Women's suffrage in the United States
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The demand for women's suffrage began to gather strength in the 1840s, emerging from the broader movement for women's rights. In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's rights convention, passed a resolution in favor of women's suffrage despite opposition from some of its organizers, who believed the idea was too extreme.[3] By the time of the first National Women's Rights Convention in 1850, however, suffrage was becoming an increasingly important aspect of the movement's activities.
The first national
Hoping that the
The first state to grant women the right to vote had been Wyoming,[6] in 1869, followed by Utah[7] in 1870, Colorado in 1893, Idaho in 1896, Washington[8] in 1910, California[9] in 1911, Oregon[10] and Arizona[11] in 1912, Montana in 1914, North Dakota, New York,[12] and Rhode Island[13] in 1917, Louisiana,[14] Oklahoma,[15] and Michigan[16] in 1918.[17]
In 1916, Alice Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP), a group focused on the passage of a national suffrage amendment. Over 200 NWP supporters, the Silent Sentinels, were arrested in 1917 while picketing the White House, some of whom went on hunger strike and endured forced feeding after being sent to prison. Under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, the two-million-member NAWSA also made a national suffrage amendment its top priority. After a hard-fought series of votes in the U.S. Congress and in state legislatures, the Nineteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on August 18, 1920.[18] It states, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."
National history
Early voting activity
Lydia Taft (1712–1778), a wealthy widow, was allowed to vote in town meetings in Uxbridge, Massachusetts in 1756.[19] No other women in the colonial era are known to have voted.[20]
The New Jersey constitution of 1776 enfranchised all adult inhabitants who owned a specified amount of property. Laws enacted in 1790 and 1797 referred to voters as "he or she", and women regularly voted. A law passed in 1807, however, excluded women from voting in that state.[21]
Kentucky passed the first statewide woman suffrage law in the antebellum era (since New Jersey revoked their woman suffrage rights in 1807) in 1838 – allowing voting by any widow or feme sole (legally, the head of household) over 21 who resided in and owned property subject to taxation for the new county's "common school" system.[22] This partial suffrage rights for women were not expressed as for whites only.[23]
Emergence of the women's rights movement
The demand for women's suffrage
The very truths you are now contending for, will, in fifty years, be so completely imbedded in public opinion that no one need say one word in their defense; whilst at the same time new forms of truth will arise to test the faithfulness of the pioneer minds of that age, and so on eternally.
—Angela Grimké, 1851, in a letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton[28]
Significant barriers had to be overcome, however, before a campaign for women's suffrage could develop significant strength. One barrier was strong opposition to women's involvement in public affairs, a practice that was not fully accepted even among reform activists. Only after fierce debate were women accepted as members of the American Anti-Slavery Society at its convention of 1839, and the organization split at its next convention when women were appointed to committees.[29]
Opposition was especially strong against the idea of women speaking to audiences of both men and women.
Other women began to give public speeches, especially in opposition to slavery and in support of
Opposition remained strong, however. A regional women's rights convention in Ohio in 1851 was disrupted by male opponents. Sojourner Truth, who delivered her famous speech "Ain't I a Woman?" at the convention, directly addressed some of this opposition in her speech.[34] The National Women's Rights Convention in 1852 was also disrupted, and mob action at the 1853 convention came close to violence.[35] The World's Temperance Convention in New York City in 1853 bogged down for three days in a dispute about whether women would be allowed to speak there.[36] Susan B. Anthony, a leader of the suffrage movement, later said, "No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public. For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized."[37]
Laws that sharply restricted the independent activity of married women also created barriers to the campaign for women's suffrage. According to
Sentiment in favor of women's rights was strong within the radical wing of the abolitionist movement. William Lloyd Garrison, the leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, said "I doubt whether a more important movement has been launched touching the destiny of the race, than this in regard to the equality of the sexes".[41][full citation needed] The abolitionist movement, however, attracted only about one per cent of the population at that time, and radical abolitionists were only one part of that movement.[42]
Early backing for women's suffrage
The
Several members of the radical wing of the abolitionist movement supported suffrage. In 1846,
Early women's rights conventions
Women's suffrage was not a major topic within the women's rights movement at that point. Many of its activists were aligned with the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement, which believed that activists should avoid political activity and focus instead on convincing others of their views with "moral suasion".[48] Many were Quakers whose traditions barred both men and women from participation in secular political activity.[49] A series of women's rights conventions did much to alter these attitudes.
Seneca Falls convention
The first women's rights convention was the
This convention was followed two weeks later by the Rochester Women's Rights Convention of 1848, which featured many of the same speakers and likewise voted to support women's suffrage. It was the first women's rights convention to be chaired by a woman, a step that was considered to be radical at the time.[56] That meeting was followed by the Ohio Women's Convention at Salem in 1850, the first women's rights convention to be organized on a statewide basis, which also endorsed women's suffrage.[57]
National conventions
The first in a series of National Women's Rights Conventions was held in Worcester, Massachusetts on October 23–24, 1850, at the initiative of Lucy Stone and Paulina Wright Davis.[58] National conventions were held afterwards almost every year through 1860, when the Civil War (1861–1865) interrupted the practice.[59] Suffrage was a preeminent goal of these conventions, no longer the controversial issue it had been at Seneca Falls only two years earlier.[60] At the first national convention Stone gave a speech that included a call to petition state legislatures for the right of suffrage.[61]
Reports of this convention reached Britain, prompting
Wendell Phillips, a prominent abolitionist and women's rights advocate, delivered a speech at the second national convention in 1851 called "Shall Women Have the Right to Vote?" Describing women's suffrage as the cornerstone of the women's movement, it was later circulated as a women's rights tract.[64]
Several of the women who played leading roles in the national conventions, especially Stone, Anthony and Stanton, were also leaders in establishing women's suffrage organizations after the Civil War.[65] They also included the demand for suffrage as part of their activities during the 1850s. In 1852, Stanton advocated women's suffrage in a speech at the New York State Temperance Convention.[66] In 1853, Stone became the first woman to appeal for women's suffrage before a body of lawmakers when she addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention.[67] In 1854, Anthony organized a petition campaign in New York State that included the demand for suffrage. It culminated in a women's rights convention in the state capitol and a speech by Stanton before the state legislature.[68] In 1857, Stone refused to pay taxes on the grounds that women were taxed without being able to vote on tax laws. The constable sold her household goods at auction until enough money had been raised to pay her tax bill.[69]
The women's rights movement was loosely structured during this period, with few state organizations and no national organization other than a coordinating committee that arranged the annual national conventions.[70] Much of the organizational work for these conventions was performed by Stone, the most visible leader of the movement during this period.[71] At the national convention in 1852, a proposal was made to form a national women's rights organization, but the idea was dropped after fears were voiced that such a move would create cumbersome machinery and lead to internal divisions.[72]
Anthony–Stanton collaboration
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton met in 1851 and soon became close friends and co-workers.[3] Their decades-long collaboration was pivotal for the suffrage movement and contributed significantly to the broader struggle for women's rights, which Stanton called "the greatest revolution the world has ever known or ever will know."[73] They had complementary skills: Anthony excelled at organizing while Stanton had an aptitude for intellectual matters and writing. Stanton, who was homebound with several children during this period, wrote speeches that Anthony delivered to meetings that she herself organized.[74] Together they developed a sophisticated movement in New York State,[75] but their work at this time dealt with women's issues in general, not specifically suffrage. Anthony, who eventually became the person most closely associated in the public mind with women's suffrage,[76] later said, "I wasn't ready to vote, didn't want to vote, but I did want equal pay for equal work."[77] In the period just before the Civil War, Anthony gave priority to anti-slavery work over her work for the women's movement.[78]
Women's Loyal National League
Over Anthony's objections, leaders of the movement agreed to suspend women's rights activities during the Civil War in order to focus on the abolition of slavery.[79] In 1863, Anthony and Stanton organized the Women's Loyal National League, the first national women's political organization in the U.S.[80] It collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery in the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time.[81]
Although it was not a suffrage organization, the League made it clear that it stood for political equality for women,[82] and it indirectly advanced that cause in several ways. Stanton reminded the public that petitioning was the only political tool available to women at a time when only men were allowed to vote.[83] The League's impressive petition drive demonstrated the value of formal organization to the women's movement, which had traditionally resisted organizational structures,[84] and it marked a continuation of the shift of women's activism from moral suasion to political action.[81] Its 5000 members constituted a widespread network of women activists who gained experience that helped create a pool of talent for future forms of social activism, including suffrage.[85]
American Equal Rights Association
The Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since the Civil War, was held in 1866, helping the women's rights movement regain the momentum it had lost during the war.[86] The convention voted to transform itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights of all citizens, especially the right of suffrage.[87]
In addition to Anthony and Stanton, who organized the convention, the leadership of the new organization included such prominent abolitionist and women's rights activists as
In April 1867, Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, opened the AERA campaign in Kansas in support of referendums in that state that would enfranchise both African Americans and women.[89] Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist leader who opposed mixing those two causes, surprised and angered AERA workers by blocking the funding that the AERA had expected for their campaign.[90] After an internal struggle, Kansas Republicans decided to support suffrage for black men only and formed an "Anti-Female Suffrage Committee" to oppose the AERA's efforts.[91] By the end of summer, the AERA campaign had almost collapsed, and its finances were exhausted. Anthony and Stanton were harshly criticized by Stone and other AERA members for accepting help during the last days of the campaign from George Francis Train, a wealthy businessman who supported women's rights. Train antagonized many activists by attacking the Republican Party, which had won the loyalty of many reform activists, and openly disparaging the integrity and intelligence of African Americans.[92]
After the Kansas campaign, the AERA increasingly divided into two wings, both advocating universal suffrage but with different approaches. One wing, whose leading figure was Lucy Stone, was willing for black men to achieve suffrage first, if necessary, and wanted to maintain close ties with the Republican Party and the abolitionist movement. The other, whose leading figures were Anthony and Stanton, insisted that women and black men be enfranchised at the same time and worked toward a politically independent women's movement that would no longer be dependent on abolitionists for financial and other resources. The acrimonious annual meeting of the AERA in May 1869 signaled the effective demise of the organization, in the aftermath of which two competing woman suffrage organizations were created.[93]
New England Woman Suffrage Association
Partly as a result of the developing split in the women's movement, in 1868 the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA), the first major political organization in the U.S. with women's suffrage as its goal, was formed.[94] The planners for the NEWSA's founding convention worked to attract Republican support and seated leading Republican politicians, including a U.S. senator, on the speaker's platform.[95] Amid increasing confidence that the Fifteenth Amendment, which would in effect enfranchise black men, was assured of passage, Lucy Stone, a future president of the NEWSA, showed her preference for enfranchising both women and African Americans by unexpectedly introducing a resolution calling for the Republican Party to "drop its watchword of 'Manhood Suffrage'"[96] and to support universal suffrage instead. Despite opposition by Frederick Douglass and others, Stone convinced the meeting to approve the resolution.[97] Two months later, however, when the Fifteenth Amendment was in danger of becoming stalled in Congress, Stone backed away from that position and declared that "Woman must wait for the Negro."[98]
The Fifteenth Amendment
In May 1869, two days after the final AERA annual meeting, Anthony, Stanton and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). In November 1869, Lucy Stone, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Blackwell and others, many of whom had helped to create the New England Woman Suffrage Association a year earlier, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). The hostile rivalry between these two organizations created a partisan atmosphere that endured for decades, affecting even professional historians of the women's movement.[99]
The immediate cause for the split was the proposed
Both wings of the movement were strongly associated with opposition to slavery, but their leaders sometimes expressed views that reflected the racial attitudes of that era. Stanton, for example, believed that a long process of education would be needed before what she called the "lower orders" of former slaves and immigrant workers would be able to participate meaningfully as voters.[102]
In an article in
The AWSA aimed for close ties with the Republican Party, hoping that the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment would lead to a Republican push for women's suffrage.
The two organizations had other differences as well. Although each campaigned for suffrage at both the state and national levels, the NWSA tended to work more at the national level and the AWSA more at the state level.
Events soon removed much of the basis for the split in the movement. In 1870 debate about the Fifteenth Amendment was made irrelevant when that amendment was officially ratified. In 1872, disgust with corruption in government led to a mass defection of abolitionists and other social reformers from the Republicans to the short-lived Liberal Republican Party.[117] The rivalry between the two women's groups was so bitter, however, that a merger proved to be impossible until 1890.
New Departure
In 1869, Francis and Virginia Minor, husband and wife suffragists from Missouri, outlined a strategy that came to be known as the New Departure, which engaged the suffrage movement for several years.[118] Arguing that the U.S. Constitution implicitly enfranchised women, this strategy relied heavily on Section 1 of the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment,[119] which reads, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
In 1871, the NWSA officially adopted the New Departure strategy, encouraging women to attempt to vote and to file lawsuits if denied that right.[3] Soon hundreds of women tried to vote in dozens of localities. In some cases, actions like these preceded the New Departure strategy: in 1868 in Vineland, New Jersey, a center for radical spiritualists, nearly 200 women placed their ballots into a separate box and attempted to have them counted, but without success. The AWSA did not officially adopt the New Departure strategy, but Lucy Stone, its leader, attempted to vote in her home town in New Jersey.[120] In one court case resulting from a lawsuit brought by women who had been prevented from voting, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., ruled that women did not have an implicit right to vote, declaring that, "The fact that the practical working of the assumed right would be destructive of civilization is decisive that the right does not exist."[121]
In 1871, Victoria Woodhull, a stockbroker, was invited to speak before a committee of Congress, the first woman to do so.[3] Although she had little previous connection to the women's movement, she presented a modified version of the New Departure strategy. Instead of asking the courts to declare that women had the right to vote, she asked Congress itself to declare that the Constitution implicitly enfranchised women. The committee rejected her suggestion.[122] The NWSA at first reacted enthusiastically to Woodhull's sudden appearance on the scene. Stanton in particular welcomed Woodhull's proposal to assemble a broad-based reform party that would support women's suffrage. Anthony opposed that idea, wanting the NWSA to remain politically independent. The NWSA soon had reason to regret its association with Woodhull. In 1872, she published details of a purported adulterous affair between Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, president of the AWSA, and Elizabeth Tilton, wife of a leading NWSA member.[123] Beecher's subsequent trial was reported in newspapers across the country, resulting in what one scholar has called "political theater" that badly damaged the reputation of the suffrage movement.[124]
The Supreme Court, in 1875, put an end to the New Departure strategy by ruling in Minor v. Happersett that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone".[125] The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment that would guarantee voting rights for women.[126]
United States v. Susan B. Anthony
In a case that generated national controversy, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for violating the Enforcement Act of 1870 by casting a vote in the 1872 presidential election. At the trial, the judge directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict. When he asked Anthony, who had not been permitted to speak during the trial, if she had anything to say, she responded with what one historian has called "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage".[119] She called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", saying, "... you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored."[127] The judge sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100, she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty", and she never did.[119] However the judge did not order her to be imprisoned until she paid the fine, for Anthony could have appealed her case.[125] On August 18, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump posthumously pardoned Anthony on the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.[128][129]
History of Woman Suffrage
In 1876, Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage began working on the History of Woman Suffrage. Originally envisioned as a modest publication that would be produced quickly, the history evolved into a six-volume work of more than 5700 pages written over a period of 41 years. Its last two volumes were published in 1920, long after the deaths of the project's originators, by Ida Husted Harper, who also assisted with the fourth volume. Written by leaders of one wing of the divided women's movement (Lucy Stone, their main rival, refused to have anything to do with the project), the History of Woman Suffrage preserves an enormous amount of material that might have been lost forever, but it does not give a balanced view of events where their rivals are concerned. Because it was for years the main source of documentation about the suffrage movement, historians have had to uncover other sources to provide a more balanced view.[130]
Introduction of the women's suffrage amendment
In 1878, Senator Aaron A. Sargent, a friend of Susan B. Anthony, introduced into Congress a women's suffrage amendment. More than forty years later it would become the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution with no changes to its wording. Its text is identical to that of the Fifteenth Amendment except that it prohibits the denial of suffrage because of sex rather than "race, color, or previous condition of servitude".[131] Although a machine politician on most issues, Sargent was a consistent supporter of women's rights who spoke at suffrage conventions and promoted suffrage through the legislative process.[132]
Early female candidates for national office
Calling attention to the irony of being legally entitled to run for office while denied the right to vote, Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared herself a candidate for the U.S. Congress in 1866, the first woman to do so.[133] In 1872, Victoria Woodhull formed her own party and declared herself to be its candidate for President of the U.S. even though she was ineligible because she was not yet 35 years old.[134]
In 1884, Belva Ann Lockwood, the first female lawyer to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, became the first woman to conduct a viable campaign for president.[135] She was nominated, without her advance knowledge, by a California group called the Equal Rights Party. Lockwood advocated women's suffrage and other reforms during a coast-to-coast campaign that received respectful coverage from at least some major periodicals. She financed her campaign partly by charging admission to her speeches. Neither the AWSA nor the NWSA, both of whom had already endorsed the Republican candidate for president, supported Lockwood's candidacy.[136]
Apart from runs for national office, many women were elected or appointed to hold certain offices across the country prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.[3] Many states constitutions contained language that was gender neutral as to the issue of officeholding. Women took advantage of this by running for office as a way to make headway in gaining the right to vote.[3] Much of women's fight to gain officeholding rights and voting rights took place separately and were understood to be completely different rights by much of the population.[3]
Initial successes and failures
Women were enfranchised in frontier Wyoming Territory in 1869 and
In the late 1870s, the suffrage movement received a major boost when the
A proposed 16th amendment, giving the vote to women, was introduced in 1869 and defeated by the Senate in 1887. Between 1870 and 1890, women's suffrage amendments were defeated by referendum in eight states.[147]
1890–1919
Merger of rival suffrage organizations
The AWSA, which was especially strong in New England, was initially the larger of the two rival suffrage organizations, but it declined in strength during the 1880s.[148] Stanton and Anthony, the leading figures in the competing NWSA, were more widely known as leaders of the women's suffrage movement during this period and were more influential in setting its direction.[149] They sometimes used daring tactics. Anthony, for example, interrupted the official ceremonies of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence to present the NWSA's Declaration of Rights for Women. The AWSA declined any involvement in the action.[150]
Over time, the NWSA moved into closer alignment with the AWSA, placing less emphasis on confrontational actions and more on respectability, and no longer promoting a wide range of reforms.[151] The NWSA's hopes for a federal suffrage amendment were frustrated when the Senate voted against it in 1887, after which the NWSA put more energy into campaigning at the state level, as the AWSA was already doing.[152] Work at the state level, however, also had its frustrations. Between 1870 and 1910, the suffrage movement conducted 480 campaigns in 33 states just to have the issue of women's suffrage brought before the voters, and those campaigns resulted in only 17 instances of the issue actually being placed on the ballot.[153] These efforts led to women's suffrage in two states, Colorado and Idaho.
Alice Stone Blackwell, daughter of AWSA leaders Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, was a major influence in bringing the rival suffrage leaders together, proposing a joint meeting in 1887 to discuss a merger. Anthony and Stone favored the idea, but opposition from several NWSA veterans delayed the move. In 1890, the two organizations merged as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).[154] Stanton was president of the new organization, and Stone was chair of its executive committee, but Anthony, who had the title of vice president, was its leader in practice, becoming president herself in 1892 when Stanton retired.[155]
National American Woman Suffrage Association
Although Anthony was the leading force in the newly merged organization, it did not always follow her lead. In 1893, the NAWSA voted over Anthony's objection to alternate the site of its annual conventions between Washington and various other parts of the country. Anthony's pre-merger NWSA had always held its conventions in Washington to help maintain focus on a national suffrage amendment. Arguing against this decision, she said she feared, accurately as it turned out, that the NAWSA would engage in suffrage work at the state level at the expense of national work.[156]
Stanton, elderly but still very much a radical, did not fit comfortably into the new organization, which was becoming more conservative. In 1895 she published The Woman's Bible, a controversial best-seller that attacked the use of the Bible to relegate women to an inferior status. The NAWSA voted to disavow any connection with the book despite Anthony's objection that such a move was unnecessary and hurtful. Stanton afterwards grew increasingly alienated from the suffrage movement.[157]
The suffrage movement declined in vigor during the years immediately after the 1890 merger.[158] When Carrie Chapman Catt was appointed head of the NAWSA's Organization Committee in 1895, it was unclear how many local chapters the organization had or who their officers were. Catt began revitalizing the organization, establishing a plan of work with clear goals for every state every year. Anthony was impressed and arranged for Catt to succeed her when she retired from the presidency of the NAWSA in 1900. In her new post, Catt continued her effort to transform the unwieldy organization into one that would be better prepared to lead a major suffrage campaign.[159]
Catt noted the rapidly growing
Catt resigned her position after four years, partly because of her husband's declining health and partly to help organize the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which was created in Germany, Berlin in 1904 with Catt as president.[163] In 1904, Anna Howard Shaw, another Anthony protégée, was elected president of the NAWSA. Shaw was an energetic worker and a talented orator but not an effective administrator. Between 1910 and 1916, the NAWSA's national board experienced a constant turmoil that endangered the existence of the organization.[164]
Although its membership and finances were at all-time highs, the NAWSA decided to replace Shaw by bringing Catt back once again as president in 1915. Authorized by the NAWSA to name her own executive board, which previously had been elected by the organization's annual convention, Catt quickly converted the loosely structured organization into one that was highly centralized.[165]
MacKenzie v. Hare
Section 3 of the Expatriation Act of 1907 provided for loss of citizenship by American women who married aliens.[166] The Supreme Court of the United States first considered the Expatriation Act of 1907 in the 1915 case MacKenzie v. Hare.[167] The plaintiff, a suffragist named Ethel MacKenzie, was living in California, which since 1911 had extended the franchise to women. However, she had been denied voter registration by the respondent in his capacity as a Commissioner of the San Francisco Board of Election on the grounds of her marriage to a Scottish man.[168] MacKenzie contended that the Expatriation Act of 1907 "if intended to apply to her, is beyond the authority of Congress", as neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor any other part of the Constitution gave Congress the power to "denationalize a citizen without his concurrence". However, Justice Joseph McKenna, writing the majority opinion, stated that while "[i]t may be conceded that a change of citizenship cannot be arbitrarily imposed, that is, imposed without the concurrence of the citizen", but "[t]he law in controversy does not have that feature. It deals with a condition voluntarily entered into, with notice of the consequences." Justice James Clark McReynolds, in a concurring opinion, stated that the case should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction.[169]
Opposition to women's suffrage
On November 5, 1895, Massachusetts held a referendum on allowing women to vote in municipal elections. The referendum failed 36.76 to 63.24. Women were allowed to vote on the measure, however, only 4% of them did so.[170]
Brewers and distillers, typically rooted in the German-American community, opposed women's suffrage, fearing—not without justification—that women voters would favor the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.[171] During the 1896 election, woman suffrage and prohibition stood together, and this was brought to the attention of those who opposed both woman suffrage and prohibition. In order to disrupt the campaign's success, a day before the election, the Liquor Dealers' League gathered some businessmen to help undermine the effort. Rumors said that these businessmen were going to make sure all the "bad women" in Oakland, California acted rowdy in order to hurt their reputation and in turn, this would lessen the women's chances of getting the woman's suffrage amendment passed.[172] German Lutherans and German Catholics typically opposed prohibition and woman suffrage; they favored paternalistic families with the husband deciding the family position on public affairs.[173][174] Their opposition to women's suffrage was subsequently used as an argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I.[175]
Defeat could lead to allegations of fraud. After the defeat of the referendum for women's suffrage in Michigan in 1912, the governor accused the brewers of complicity in widespread electoral fraud that resulted in its defeat. Evidence of vote stealing was also strong during referendums in Nebraska and Iowa.[176]
Some other businesses, such as Southern cotton mills, opposed suffrage because they feared that women voters would support the drive to eliminate child labor.[177] Political machines, such as Tammany Hall in New York City, opposed it because they feared that the addition of female voters would dilute the control they had established over groups of male voters. By the time of the New York State referendum on women's suffrage in 1917, however, some wives and daughters of Tammany Hall leaders were working for suffrage, leading it to take a neutral position that was crucial to the referendum's passage.[178][179] Although the Catholic Church did not take an official position on suffrage, very few of its leaders supported it, and some of its leaders, such as
The New York Times after first supporting suffrage reversed itself and issued stern warnings. A 1912 editorial predicted that with suffrage women would make impossible demands, such as, "serving as soldiers and sailors, police patrolmen or firemen...and would serve on juries and elect themselves to executive offices and judgeships." It blamed a lack of masculinity for the failure of men to fight back, warning women would get the vote "if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them.".[182]
Women against suffrage
Anti-suffrage forces, initially called the "remonstrants", organized as early as 1870 when the Woman's Anti-Suffrage Association of Washington was formed.[183] Widely known as the "antis", they eventually created organizations in some twenty states. In 1911, the National Association Opposed to Women's Suffrage was created. It claimed 350,000 members and opposed women's suffrage, feminism, and socialism. It argued that woman suffrage "would reduce the special protections and routes of influence available to women, destroy the family, and increase the number of socialist-leaning voters."[184]
Middle and upper class anti-suffrage women were conservatives with several motivations. Society women in particular had personal access to powerful politicians, and were reluctant to surrender that advantage. Most often the antis believed that politics was dirty and that women's involvement would surrender the moral high ground that women had claimed, and that partisanship would disrupt local club work for civic betterment, as represented by the General Federation of Women's Clubs.[185] The best organized movement was the New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NYSAOWS). Its credo, as set down by its president Josephine Jewell Dodge, was:
We believe in every possible advancement to women. We believe that this advancement should be along those legitimate lines of work and endeavor for which she is best fitted and for which she has now unlimited opportunities. We believe this advancement will be better achieved through strictly non-partisan effort and without the limitations of the ballot. We believe in Progress, not in Politics for women.[186]
The New York State Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NYSAOWS) used grass roots mobilization techniques they had learned from watching the suffragists to defeat the 1915 referendum. They were very similar to the suffragists themselves, but used a counter-crusading style warning of the evils that suffrage would bring to women. They rejected leadership by men and stressed the importance of independent women in philanthropy and social betterment. NYSAOWS was narrowly defeated in New York in 1916 and the state voted to give women the vote. The organization moved to Washington to oppose the federal constitutional amendment for suffrage, becoming the "National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage" (NAOWS), where it was taken over by men, and assumed a much harsher rhetorical tone, especially in attacking "red radicalism". After 1919, the antis adjusted smoothly to enfranchisement and became active in party affairs, especially in the Republican Party.[187]
Southern strategy
The Constitution required 34 states (three-fourths of the 45 states in 1900) to ratify an amendment, and unless the rest of the country was unanimous there had to be support from at least some of the 11 ex-Confederate states for the Amendment to succeed. The South was the most conservative region and always gave the least support for suffrage. There was little or no suffrage activity in the region until the late nineteenth century.
The women who are working for this measure are striking at the principle for which their fathers fought during the Civil War. Woman's suffrage comes from the North and the West and from women who do not believe in state's rights and who wish to see negro women using the ballot. I do not believe the state of Georgia has sunk so low that her good men can not legislate for women. If this time ever comes then it will be time for women to claim the ballot.[191]
Elna Green points out that, "Suffrage rhetoric claimed that enfranchised women would outlaw child labor, pass minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws for women workers, and establish health and safety standards for factory workers." The threat of these reforms united planters, textile mill owners, railroad magnates, city machine bosses, and the liquor interest in a formidable combine against suffrage.[192]
Henry Browne Blackwell, an officer of the AWSA before the merger and a prominent figure in the movement afterwards, urged the suffrage movement to follow a strategy of convincing southern political leaders that they could ensure white supremacy in their region without violating the Fifteenth Amendment by enfranchising educated women, who would predominantly be white. Shortly after Blackwell presented his proposal to the Mississippi delegation to the U.S. Congress, his plan was given serious consideration by the Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890, whose main purpose was to find legal ways of further curtailing the political power of African Americans. Although the convention adopted other measures instead, the fact that Blackwell's ideas were taken seriously drew the interest of many suffragists.[193]
Blackwell's ally in this effort was Laura Clay, who convinced the NAWSA to launch a state-by-state campaign in the South based on Blackwell's strategy. Clay was one of several Southern NAWSA members who opposed the idea of a national women's suffrage amendment on the grounds that it would impinge on states' rights. (A generation later Clay campaigned against the pending national amendment during the final battle for its ratification.) Amid predictions by some proponents of this strategy that the South would lead the way in the enfranchisement of women, suffrage organizations were established throughout the region. Anthony, Catt and Blackwell campaigned for suffrage in the South in 1895, with the latter two calling for suffrage only for educated women. With Anthony's reluctant cooperation, the NAWSA maneuvered to accommodate the politics of white supremacy in that region. Anthony asked her old friend Frederick Douglass, a former slave, not to attend the NAWSA convention in Atlanta in 1895, the first to be held in a Southern city. Black NAWSA members were excluded from 1903 convention in the Southern city of New Orleans, which marked the peak of this strategy's influence.[194]
The leaders of the Southern movement were privileged upper-class belles with a strong position in high society and in church affairs. They tried to use their upscale connections to convince powerful men that suffrage was a good idea to purify society. They also argued that giving white women the vote would more than counterbalance giving the vote to the smaller number of black women.[195] No Southern state enfranchised women as a result of this strategy, however, and most Southern suffrage societies that were established during this period lapsed into inactivity. The NAWSA leadership afterwards said it would not adopt policies that "advocated the exclusion of any race or class from the right of suffrage."[196] Nonetheless, NAWSA reflected its white membership's viewpoint by minimizing the role of black suffragists.
Anti-black racism
The woman's suffrage movement, led in the nineteenth century by stalwart women such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had its genesis in the abolitionist movement, but by the dawn of the twentieth century, Anthony's goal of universal suffrage was eclipsed by a near-universal racism in the United States.[197][198] While earlier suffragists had believed the two issues could be linked, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment forced a division between African-American rights and suffrage for women by prioritizing voting rights for black men over universal suffrage for all men and women.[199] In 1903, the NAWSA officially adopted a platform of states' rights that was intended to mollify and bring Southern U.S. suffrage groups into the fold. The statement's signers included Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, and Anna Howard Shaw.
With the prevalence of "racial" segregation throughout the country, and within organizations such as the NAWSA, black people had formed their own activist groups to fight for their equal rights. Many were college educated and resented their exclusion from political power. The fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 also fell in 1913, giving them even further incentive to march in the suffrage parade.[200] Nellie Quander of Alpha Kappa Alpha—the nation's oldest black sorority—asked for a place in the college women's section for the women of Howard University.[201] While there were two letters discussing the matter, the letter on February 17, 1913, discusses the desire for the women of Howard to be given a desirable place in the march as well as mentioning correspondence and requests from an AKA sorority member, leader of the suffrage parade, vice president of the NAWSA, and appointer of both Paul & Burns as the organizer of the parade, Jane Addams.[202] These letters were follow-up discussions to the one begun by Paul and initiated by Elise Hill when Hill went down to Howard University at the request of Paul to recruit the Howard women.[203][204] The Howard University group included "Artist, one—Mrs. May Howard Jackson; college women, six—Mrs. Mary Church Terrell, Mrs. Daniel Murray, Miss Georgia Simpson, Miss Charlotte Steward, Miss Harriet Shadd, Miss Bertha McNiel ; teacher, one—Miss Caddie Park; musician, one— Mrs. Harriett G. Marshall; professional women, two— Dr. Amanda V. Gray, Dr. Eva Ross; Illinois delegation—Mrs. Ida Wells Barnett; Michigan—Mrs. McCoy, of Detroit, who carried the banner; Howard University, group of twenty-five girls in caps and gowns; home makers—Mrs. Duffield, who carried New York banner, Mrs. M. D. Butler, Mrs. Carrie W. Clifford." One trained nurse, whose name could not be ascertained, marched, and an old mammy was brought down by the Delaware delegation.[205]
But the Virginia-born Gardener tried to persuade Paul that including black people would be a bad idea because the Southern delegations were threatening to pull out of the march. Paul had attempted to keep news about black marchers out of the press, but when the Howard group announced they intended to participate, the public became aware of the conflict.[206] A newspaper account indicated that Paul told some black suffragists that the NAWSA believed in equal rights for "colored women", but that some Southern women were likely to object to their presence. A source in the organization insisted that the official stance was to "permit negroes to march if they cared to".[206] In a 1974 oral history interview, Paul recalled the "hurdle" of Terrell's plan to march, which upset the Southern delegations. She said the situation was resolved when a Quaker leading the men's section proposed the men march between the Southern groups and the Howard University group.[207]
While in Paul's memory, a compromise was reached to order the parade with Southern women, then the men's section, and finally the Negro women's section, reports in the NAACP paper, The Crisis, depict events unfolding quite differently, with black women protesting the plan to segregate them.[208] What is clear is that some groups attempted, on the day of the parade, to segregate their delegations.[209] For example, a last-minute instruction by the chair of the state delegation section, Genevieve Stone, caused additional uproar when she asked the Illinois delegation's sole black member, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, to march with the segregated black group at the back of the parade. Some historians claim Paul made the request, though this seems unlikely after the official NAWSA decision.[206][209] Wells-Barnett eventually rejoined the Illinois delegation as the procession moved down the avenue. In the end, black women marched in several state delegations, including New York and Michigan. Some joined in with their co-workers in the professional groups. There were also black men driving many of the floats.[210] The spectators did not treat the black participants any differently.[210]
New Woman
The concept of the New Woman emerged in the late nineteenth century to characterize the increasingly independent activity of women, especially the younger generation. According to one scholar, "The New Woman became associated with the rise of feminism and the campaign for women's suffrage, as well as with the rise of consumerism, mass culture, and freer expressions of sexuality that defined the first decades of the 20th century."[212]
The move of women into public spaces was expressed in many ways. In the late 1890s, riding bicycles was a newly popular activity that increased women's mobility even as it signaled rejection of traditional teachings about women's weakness and fragility. Susan B. Anthony said bicycles had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world".[213] Elizabeth Cady Stanton said that "Woman is riding to suffrage on the bicycle.[214]
Activists campaigned for suffrage in ways that were still considered by many to be "unladylike," such as marching in parades and giving street corner speeches on soap boxes. In New York in 1912, suffragists organized a twelve-day, 170-mile "Hike to Albany" to deliver suffrage petitions to the new governor. In 1913 the suffragist "Army of the Hudson" marched 250 miles from New York to Washington in sixteen days, gaining national publicity.[215]
New suffrage organizations
College Equal Suffrage League
When Maud Wood Park attended the NAWSA convention in 1900, she found herself to be virtually the only young person there. After returning to Boston, she formed the College Equal Suffrage League with the assistance of fellow Radcliffe alumnae Inez Haynes Irwin and affiliated it with the NAWSA. Largely through Park's efforts, similar groups were organized on campuses in 30 states, leading to the formation of the National College Equal Suffrage League in 1908.[216][217]
Equality League of Self-Supporting Women
The dramatic tactics of the militant wing of the British suffrage movement began to influence the movement in the U.S.
National Council of Women Voters
The National Council of Women Voters (NCWV) was founded in 1911 to represent women in states where women's suffrage had been achieved. Initially those states were Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Washington. Some other states, including California, followed soon after.
National Woman's Party
Work toward a national suffrage amendment had been sharply curtailed in favor of state suffrage campaigns after the two rival suffrage organizations merged in 1890 to form the NAWSA. Interest in a national suffrage amendment was revived primarily by Alice Paul.[152] In 1910, she returned to the U.S. from England, where she had been part of the militant wing of the suffrage movement. Paul had been jailed there and had endured forced feedings after going on a hunger strike. In January 1913, she arrived in Washington as chair of the Congressional Committee of the NAWSA, charged with reviving the drive for a constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women. She and her coworker Lucy Burns organized a suffrage parade in Washington on the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as president. Opponents of the march turned the event into a near riot, which ended only when a cavalry unit of the army was brought in to restore order. Public outrage over the incident, which cost the chief of police his job, brought publicity to the movement and gave it fresh momentum.[222] In 1914, Paul and her followers began referring to the proposed suffrage amendment as the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment,"[223] a name that was widely adopted.[224]
Paul argued that because the Democrats would not act to enfranchise women even though they controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, the suffrage movement should work for the defeat of all Democratic candidates regardless of an individual candidate's position on suffrage. She and Burns formed a separate
In 1916 Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP).[227] Once again the women's movement had split, but the result this time was something like a division of labor. The NAWSA burnished its image of respectability and engaged in highly organized lobbying at both the national and state levels. The smaller NWP also engaged in lobbying but became increasingly known for activities that were dramatic and confrontational, most often in the national capital.[228] One form of protest was the watchfires, which involved burning copies of President Wilson's speeches, often outside the White House or in the nearby Lafayette Park. The NWP continued to hold watchfires even as the war began, drawing criticism from the public and even other suffrage groups for being unpatriotic.[229]
Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference
The leaders of the NAWSA's Southern Strategy began to find their own voice by 1913 when Kate Gordon of Louisiana and
Suffrage periodicals
Stanton and Anthony launched a sixteen-page weekly newspaper called The Revolution in 1868. It focused primarily on women's rights, especially suffrage, but it also covered politics, the labor movement, and other topics. Its energetic and broad-ranging style gave it a lasting influence, but its debts mounted when it did not receive the funding they had expected, and they had to transfer the paper to other hands after only twenty-nine months.[233] Their organization, the NWSA, afterwards depended on other periodicals, such as The National Citizen and Ballot Box, edited by Matilda Joslyn Gage, and The Woman's Tribune, edited by Clara Bewick Colby, to represent its viewpoint.[234]
In 1870, shortly after the formation of the AWSA, Lucy Stone launched an eight-page weekly newspaper called the Woman's Journal to advocate for women's rights, especially suffrage. Better financed and less radical than The Revolution, it had a much longer life. By the 1880s it had become an unofficial voice of the suffrage movement as a whole.[235] In 1916 the NAWSA purchased the Woman's Journal and spent a significant amount of money to enhance it. It was renamed Woman Citizen and declared to be the official organ of the NAWSA.[236]
Alice Paul began publishing a newspaper called The Suffragist in 1913 when she was still part of the NAWSA. Editor of the eight-page weekly was Rheta Childe Dorr, an experienced journalist.[237]
Turn of the tide
The reform campaigns of the
By 1916, suffrage for women had become a major national issue, and the NAWSA had become the nation's largest voluntary organization, with two million members.[242] In 1916, the conventions of both the Democratic and Republican parties endorsed women's suffrage, but only on a state-by-state basis, with the implication that the various states might implement suffrage in different ways or (in some cases) not at all. Having expected more, Catt called an emergency NAWSA convention and proposed what became known as the "Winning Plan".[243] For several years, the NAWSA had focused on achieving suffrage on a state-by-state basis, partly to accommodate members from Southern states who opposed the idea of a national suffrage amendment, considering it an infringement on states' rights.[244] In a strategic shift, the 1916 convention approved Catt's proposal to make a national amendment the priority for the entire organization. It authorized the executive board to specify a plan of work toward this goal for each state and to take over that work if the state organization refused to comply.[245]
In 1917, Catt received a
In January 1917, the NWP stationed pickets at the White House, which had never before been picketed, with banners demanding women's suffrage.[247] Tension escalated in June as a Russian delegation drove up to the White House and NPW members unfurled a banner that read, "We, the women of America, tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote. President Wilson is the chief opponent of their national enfranchisement".[248] In August, another banner referred to "Kaiser Wilson" and compared the plight of the German people with that of American women.[249]
Some of the onlookers, including crowds of drunken men in town for the second inauguration of Woodrow Wilson,[250] reacted violently, tearing the banners from the picketers' hands. The police, whose actions had previously been restrained, began arresting the picketers for blocking the sidewalk. Eventually over 200 were arrested, about half of whom were sent to prison.[251] In October Alice Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison. When she and other suffragist prisoners began a hunger strike, prison authorities force-fed them. The negative publicity created by this harsh practice increased the pressure on the administration, which capitulated and released all the prisoners.[252]
The entry of the U.S. into World War I in April 1917, had a significant impact on the suffrage movement. To replace men who had gone into the military, women moved into workplaces that did not traditionally hire women, such as steel mills and oil refineries. The NAWSA cooperated with the war effort, with Catt and Shaw serving on the Women's Committee for the Council of National Defense. The NWP, by contrast, took no steps to cooperate with the war effort.[253] Jeannette Rankin, elected in 1916 by Montana as the first woman in Congress, was one of fifty members of Congress to vote against the declaration of war.[254]
In November 1917, a referendum to enfranchise women in New York – at that time the most populous state in the country – passed by a substantial margin.[255] In September 1918, President Wilson spoke before the Senate, calling for approval of the suffrage amendment as a war measure, saying "We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?"[256] In the 1918 elections, despite the threat of
The war served as a catalyst for suffrage extension in several countries, with women gaining the vote after years of campaigning partly in recognition of their support for the war effort, which further increased the pressure for suffrage in the U.S.[260] About half of the women in Britain had become enfranchised by January 1918, as had women in most Canadian provinces, with Quebec the major exception.[261]
Nineteenth Amendment
World War I had a profound impact on woman suffrage across the belligerents. Women played a major role on the home fronts and many countries recognized their sacrifices with the vote during or shortly after the war, including the U.S., Britain, Canada (except Quebec), Denmark, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia, Sweden; and Ireland introduced universal suffrage with independence. France almost did so but stopped short.[262] Despite their eventual success, groups like the National Woman's Party that continued militant protests during wartime were criticized by other suffrage groups and the public, who viewed it as unpatriotic.[263]
On January 12, 1915, a suffrage bill was brought before the House of Representatives but was defeated by a vote of 204 to 174, (Democrats 170–85 against, Republicans 81–34 for, Progressives 6–0 for).[264] President Woodrow Wilson held off until he was sure the Democratic Party was supportive; the 1917 referendum in New York State in favor of suffrage proved decisive for him. When another bill was brought before the House in January 1918, Wilson made a strong and widely published appeal to the House to pass the bill.[265] Behn argues that:
- The National American Woman Suffrage Association, not the National Woman's Party, was decisive in Wilson's conversion to the cause of the federal amendment because its approach mirrored his own conservative vision of the appropriate method of reform: win a broad consensus, develop a legitimate rationale, and make the issue politically valuable. Additionally, I contend that Wilson did have a significant role to play in the successful congressional passage and national ratification of the 19th Amendment.[266]
The Amendment passed by two-thirds of the House, with only one vote to spare. The vote was then carried into the Senate. Again President Wilson made an appeal, but on September 30, 1918, the amendment fell two votes short of the two-thirds necessary for passage, 53–31 (Republicans 27–10 for, Democrats 26–21 for).[267] On February 10, 1919, it was again voted upon, and then it was lost by only one vote, 54–30 (Republicans 30–12 for, Democrats 24–18 for).[268]
There was considerable anxiety among politicians of both parties to have the amendment passed and made effective before the general elections of 1920, so the President called a special session of Congress, and a bill, introducing the amendment, was brought before the House again. On May 21, 1919, it was passed, 304 to 89, (Republicans 200-19 for, Democrats 102-69 for, Union Labor 1-0 for, Prohibitionist 1-0 for),[269] 42 votes more than necessary being obtained. On June 4, 1919, it was brought before the Senate, and after a long discussion it was passed, with 56 ayes and 25 nays (Republicans 36-8 for, Democrats 20-17 for).[270] Within a few days, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Michigan ratified the amendment, their legislatures being then in session. Other states followed suit at a regular pace, until the amendment had been ratified by 35 of the necessary 36 state legislatures. After Washington on March 22, 1920, ratification languished for months. Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee narrowly ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, making it the law throughout the United States.[271] Thus the 1920 election became the first United States presidential election in which women were permitted to vote in every state.
To get the word male in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign...During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six 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 in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses. Millions of dollars were raised, mainly in small sums, and expended with economic care. Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could.
—Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.[272][273]
Three other states, Connecticut, Vermont and Delaware, passed the amendment by 1923. They were eventually followed by others in the south. Nearly twenty years later, Maryland ratified the amendment in 1941. After another ten years, in 1952, Virginia ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, followed by Alabama in 1953.[274] After another 16 years, Florida and South Carolina passed the necessary votes to ratify in 1969, followed two years later by Georgia,[275] Louisiana and North Carolina.[274]
Mississippi did not ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1984, sixty four years after the law was enacted nationally.[276]
Effects of the Nineteenth Amendment
In the United States
Politicians responded to the newly enlarged electorate by emphasizing issues of special interest to women, especially prohibition, child health, public schools, and world peace.[278] Women did respond to these issues, but in terms of general voting they had the same outlook and the same voting behavior as men.[279]
The suffrage organization
Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment did not in actual practice provide suffrage to all women in the United States.[281] Women's rights to a public identity were restricted by the common law practice of coverture.[282] As women were not citizens in their own right and married women were required to assume the citizenship and residency requirements of their spouses, many women upon marriage had no voting rights.[283][281] The Naturalization Act of 1790 granted any free white, who met character and residency policies, the right to become a citizen and the 14th Amendment extended citizenship to those born in the United States, including African-Americans.[284] Rulings by the Supreme Court allowed racial limitations to naturalization of people who were neither black nor white.[284][285] This meant that Latinos, Asians, and Eastern Europeans, among other groups, were at various times barred from becoming citizens.[286][287] Exclusions based on race also applied to Native American women living on reservations, until the passage in 1924 of the Indian Citizenship Act.[288] As a result, if an American woman married someone who was ineligible for naturalization, until passage of the Cable Act of 1922 and various amendments, she lost her citizenship.[289]
As the US Constitution grants states the ability to determine who is eligible to vote in elections,[290] until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, legislative variations among the states, led to extremely different civil rights for women within the federal system depending upon their residency.[291] Restrictions on literacy, moral character, and ability to pay poll taxes were used to legally exclude women from voting.[292] Large numbers of African American women, as well as men, continued to be denied suffrage in the southern states.[293] Latinos and non-English speaking women were routinely excluded by literacy requirements in the northern states,[294] and many poor women, regardless of race, had no ability to pay poll taxes.[295] As married women's wages and legal access to money were controlled by their husbands, many married women had no ability to pay poll taxes.[296] In 1940, US women were granted their own legal status as citizens and provisions were made for women who had previously lost their citizenship through marriage to regain it.[297]
Native American women
The early women's suffrage movement had drawn
In U.S. territories
At the time the 19th Amendment was passed, both Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands were unincorporated territories of the United States.[305] Suffragists believed that women in the Virgin Islands had been enfranchised when the Danish extended suffrage in 1915, as at that time the Danish West Indies were their possession. Similarly, as Puerto Ricans were confirmed to be U. S. citizens in 1917, it was assumed that suffrage had been extended there as well with the passage of the 19th Amendment.[306] Upon questioning its applicability in Puerto Rico, Governor Arthur Yager received clarification from the Bureau of Insular Affairs that passage or ratification in the states would not grant women's suffrage in Puerto Rico, because of the island's unincorporated status.[307] In 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified that constitutional rights did not extend to residents in the two territories as they were defined in Puerto Rico by the Organic Act of 1900 and in the Virgin Islands by the Danish Colonial Law of 1906.[306]
Suffragists and their supporters unsuccessfully introduced enfranchisement bills to the insular legislature in Puerto Rico in 1919, 1921, and 1923.[308] In 1924, Milagros Benet de Mewton sued the electoral board for refusing to allow her to register.[309][310] Her case argued that as a U.S. citizen, she should be allowed to vote in accordance with the U.S. Constitution,[311] because territorial law was not allowed to contravene U.S. law. The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico ruled that the electoral law was not discriminatory because Puerto Ricans were not allowed to vote for federal electors,[312] and that the territory, like U.S. states, retained the right to define who was eligible to vote.[313] Another failed bill, in 1927, led Benet and women involved in the Pan-American Women's Association to press the US Congress to enfranchise Puerto Rican women.[314][315] When in 1928, the bill passed out of committee and was scheduled for a vote the U. S. House of Representatives, the Puerto Rican legislature realized that if they did not extend suffrage the federal government would. They passed a limited suffrage bill on April 16, 1929, limiting voting rights to literate women.[316] Universal suffrage was finally achieved in Puerto Rico in 1936, when a bill submitted by the Socialist Party the previous year, gained approval in the insular legislature.[317]
In the US Virgin Islands, voting was restricted to men who were literate and owned property. Teachers like Edith L. Williams and Mildred V. Anduze pressed for women to gain the vote.[318] In 1935, the Saint Thomas Teachers' Association filed a lawsuit challenging the applicability of the 19th amendment to Virgin Islanders. In November 1935, the court ruled that the Danish Colonial Law was unconstitutional as it conflicted with the 19th Amendment[319] and that it had not been the intent to limit the franchise to men. To test the law, Williams attempted to register to vote and encouraged other teachers to do so, but their applications were refused. Williams, Eulalie Stevens and Anna M. Vessup, all literate, property owners, petitioned the court to open elections to qualified women.[320] Judge Albert Levitt ruled in favor of the women on December 27, which led to mobilization to register to vote in Saint Croix and Saint John.[319]
Though Guam was acquired by the United States at the same time as Puerto Rico, the 19th Amendment was not extended by the US Congress to Guamanians until 1968.[321][322] Congress also extended it to the Northern Mariana Islands in 1976 under the Marianas Covenant.[323] Though the US Congress has not verified the applicability of the Nineteenth Amendment to American Samoa the territorial constitution implies its applicability in the jurisdiction.[323]
Changes in the voting population
Although restricting access to the polls because of sex was made unconstitutional in 1920, women did not turn out to the polls in the same numbers as men until 1980. A term commonly used that represents the push for equal representation in government is known as Mirror Representation. The amount of representation of sex in government should match the portion of that specific sex in the population. From 1980 until the present, women have voted in elections in at least the same percentage as have men, and often more. This difference in voting turnout and preferences between men and women is known as the
Changes in representation and government programs
After women gained the right to vote, the presence of women in Congress has gradually increased since 1920, with an especially steady increase from 1981.[citation needed] Today, women increasingly pursue politics as a career.[citation needed] At the state and national level, women have brought attention to gender-sensitive topics, gender equality, and children's rights. Women's participation rate is higher at local levels of government.[citation needed]
In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.
In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman vice presidential candidate to be nominated by a major party.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential candidate to be nominated by a major party.
In 2019, 25 out of 100 senators were women, and 102 out of 435 representatives were women.[324] This resembles the global average; around the world, in 2018, just under a quarter of national-level parliament representatives were women.[325]
In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris became the highest-ranking female elected official in U.S. history after assuming office alongside President Joe Biden.[326]
Notable legislation
Immediately following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, many legislators feared a powerful women's bloc would emerge as a result of female enfranchisement. The Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which expanded maternity care during the 1920s, was one of the first laws passed appealing to the female vote.[327]
Title IX is a federal civil rights law that was passed in 1972 as part (Title IX) of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or other education program that receives federal money.
Socio-economic effects
A paper by
A 2020 study found that "exposure to suffrage during childhood led to large increases in educational attainment for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, especially black people and Southern white people. We also find that suffrage led to higher earnings alongside education gains, although not for Southern black people."[329] These improvements are largely driven by suffrage-induced growth in education spending.[329]
"Queering the suffrage movement"
During the celebration of the
See also
- African-American women's suffrage movement
- Anti-suffragism
- Art in the women's suffrage movement in the United States
- California Proposition 4 (1911)
- League of Women Voters
- List of suffragists and suffragettes
- List of women's rights activists
- List of women's rights conventions in the United States
- Music and women's suffrage in the United States
- Native Americans and women's suffrage in the United States
- National American Woman Suffrage Association
- Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
- Portrait Monument
- Silent Sentinels
- Suffrage
- Suffrage Hikes
- Timeline of women's legal rights (other than voting)
- Timeline of women's suffrage
- Timeline of women's suffrage in the United States
- Women's suffrage in states of the United States
- Women in United States juries
References
- ^ "Suffragists Parade Down Fifth Avenue – 1917". The New York Times. 1917.
- ^ Temkin, Moshik (January 22, 2024). "Essential Elements for Turning a Cause into a Movement : Lessons from the Suffrage Struggle for Today's Activists". The Commons Social Change Library. Retrieved February 24, 2024.
- ^ SSRN 3896499.
- ISBN 9781610695961.
- ISBN 9781576078600.
- ^ "Right Choice, Wrong Reasons: Wyoming Women Win the Right to Vote | WyoHistory.org". www.wyohistory.org. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "Women's Suffrage in Utah". History to Go. April 29, 2016. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "The History of Voting and Elections in Washington State". www2.sos.wa.gov. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "History of Women's Suffrage in California :: California Secretary of State". www.sos.ca.gov. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "WOMAN SUFFRAGE". Oregon State Capitol Foundation. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ Brammell, Kasey (July 7, 2020). "How Arizona women won the vote". Arizona PBS. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "Recognizing Women's Right to Vote in New York State | New York Heritage". nyheritage.org. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "The Struggle for Woman Suffrage in Rhode Island | EnCompass". Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "Woman Suffrage". 64 Parishes. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "Suffrage Amendment | The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture". Oklahoma Historical Society | OHS. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "Michigan and the 19th Amendment (U.S. National Park Service)". www.nps.gov. Retrieved October 3, 2023.
- ^ "Timeline and Map of Woman Suffrage Legislation". Mapping American Social Movements Project. University of Washington. Retrieved September 25, 2022.
- ^ "The 19th Amendment". National Archives. May 16, 2019. Retrieved May 31, 2019.
- ^ Chapin, Judge Henry (1881). Address Delivered at the Unitarian Church in Uxbridge, 1864. Worcester, Massachusetts. p. 172.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Johanna Neuman, And yet they persisted: how American women won the right to vote (2020) p. 1 excerpt
- ^ Wellman (2004), p. 138
- ^ "Kentucky and the 19th Amendment", National Park Service article. Retrieved February 27, 2021
- ^ "An Act to establish a system of Common Schools in the State of Kentucky, Chap. 898, Sec. 37". Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, December Session, 1837. Frankfort: A.G. Hodges State Printer. 1838. p. 282. Retrieved January 25, 2018.
- ^ Early activists tended to refer to "woman suffrage," but historians usually call it "women's suffrage." See Gordon (1997), p. xxiv n. 5
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 32
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 43, 348 n.19. Flexner refers to it a pamphlet, but it has 128 pages. See The Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women by Sarah Grimké, 1838, Boston: Isaac Knapp.
- ISBN 0-87023-941-4.
- ^ Quoted in DuBois, ed. (1992), epigraph, prior to p. 1
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 40, 45
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 25–26, 42, 45–46
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 40
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 120
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 1, 91–92
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 85
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 117–18
- ^ Harper (1898–1908), Vol. 1, pp. 101–03
- ^ Susan B. Anthony, "Fifty Years of Work for Woman,"
Independent, 52 (February 15, 1900), pp. 414–17. Quoted in Sherr, Lynn (1995), Failure is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words, p.134. New York: Random House. ISBN 0-8129-2430-4
- ^ Quoted in Gordon (2000), p. 41
- ISBN 0-8078-2016-4
- ^ Barry (1988), p. 259
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), p. 9
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 57
- ^ Wellman (2004), p. 150
- ^ Wellman (2004), pp. 151–52. May condemned as "all unequal, all unrighteous—this utter annihilation, politically considered, of more than one half of the whole community." See Samuel J. May, "The Rights and Conditions of Women", in Women's Rights Tract No. 1: Commensurate with her capacities and obligations, are Woman's Rights (Syracuse, N.Y.: N.M.D. Lathrop, 1853), p. 2.
- ^ Million (2003), p. 72
- ^ Quoted in Million (2003), p. 99
- ^ Wellman (2004), p. 176. Gerrit Smith was a cousin and close friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Wellman says they spurred each other to develop ideas of inclusive politics and to publicly advocate voting rights for women, which Smith did before Stanton.
- ^ Wellman (2004), p.45
- ^ Wellman (2004), p. 204
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 3, 72, 77, 84
- ^ Dubois, ed. (1992) p. 13
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 99–100
- ^ Wellman (2004), pp. 193, 195, 203
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 88–89, 238–39
- ^ "Seneca Falls Convention – American Memory Timeline- Classroom Presentation". Teacher Resources – Library of Congress. Library of Congress. Retrieved July 29, 2016.
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 95–97
- ^ Wellman, Judith (2008). "The Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention and the Origin of the Women's Rights Movement", pp. 15, 84. National Park Service, Women's Rights National Historical Park. Wellman is identified as the author of this document here.
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 104, 106
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 110
- ^ DuBois (1978), p. 41. The conventions also discussed a variety of other issues, including dress reform and liberalization of divorce laws.
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 109–10
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 115
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 76
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 116
- ^ The first national convention was organized primarily by Davis. The next several conventions were organized primarily by Stone. After the birth of her daughter in 1857, Stone withdrew from most public activity for several years. Anthony shared responsibilities for the 1858 and 1859 conventions. Stanton was the primary organizer of the 1860 convention. For details, see Million (2003), pp. 105–6, 116, 174, 239, 250–52, 260, 263–69
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 123
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 136–37.
- ^ Barry (1988), pp. 79–80
- ^ Million (2003), p. 245.
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 109, 121
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 116, 173–74, 264
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 113
- ISBN 978-0195119695
- ^ Ginzberg (2009), pp. 76–77
- ^ Gordon (1997), p. xxx
- ISBN 978-0199743360
- ^ National Woman Suffrage Association, Report of the International Council of Women, Volume 1, 1888, p. 327
- ^ Million (2003), pp. 234–35
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 149
- ^ Judith E. Harper. "Biography". Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Retrieved June 11, 2013.
- ^ a b Venet (1991), p. 148
- ^ Dudden (2011), p. 51
- ^ Venet (1991), p. 116
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 105
- ^ For membership numbers, see Barry (1988), p. 154. For "pool of talent," see Venet (1991), p. 1.
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, pp. 152–53
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, pp. 171–72
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, p. 270. Greeley was referring to the 1867 AERA campaign in New York State for women's suffrage and the removal of discriminatory property requirements for black voters.
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, p. 232
- ^ Dudden (2011), p. 105
- ^ Dudden (2011), pp. 124, 127
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 92–94.
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 80–81, 189, 196. The AERA held no further annual meetings and went out of existence a year later. See Harper (1899), pp. 348–49
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 164, 168
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 164–66
- ^ "Woman Suffrage," New York Tribune, November 21, 1868; "Mrs. Lucy Stone and Woman Suffrage," cited in Dudden (2011); p. 163
- ^ Dudden (2011); p. 163
- ^ "Stones Holding Their Peace," and "Lucy Stone and the Negro's Hour," Revolution 3 (February 4, 1869):73, 89. Citied in Dudden (2011); p 165
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 173, 189, 196.
- ^ Rakow and Kramarae eds. (2001), p. 47
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 174–75, 185
- ^ a b Rakow and Kramarae eds. (2001), p. 48
- ^ Dudden (2011), p. 184
- ^ "The Anniversaries". New York Tribune. May 15, 1868. Quoted in Dudden (2011), p. 149.
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, pp. 382–384. Douglass and Stone are speaking here during the final AERA convention in 1869.
- ^ Barry (1988), pp. 194, 208. The 1869 AERA annual meeting voted to endorse the Fifteenth Amendment.
- ^ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "The Sixteenth Amendment," The Revolution, April 29, 1869, p. 266. Quoted in DuBois (1978), p. 178.
- ^ Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Manhood Suffrage," The Revolution, December 24, 1868. Reproduced in Gordon (2000), p. 196
- ^ Quoted in Gordon (2000), p. 190
- ^ Henry B. Blackwell (January 15, 1867). "What the South can do". Library of Congress. Retrieved March 2, 2017. Cited in Dudden (2011), p. 93
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 199–200. That did not happen; the high point of Republican support was a non-committal reference to women's suffrage in the 1872 Republican platform.
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, p. 341. This letter was signed by Anthony, who was requesting permission to present their views to the convention in person.
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 109–10, 200
- ^ Dudden (2011), p. 152.
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), p. 17
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp.192, 196, 197
- ^ DuBois (1978), pp. 166, 200
- ^ DuBois (1998), pp. 98–99, 117
- ^ a b c Ann D. Gordon. "The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: A Short Narrative". Federal Judicial Center. Retrieved August 21, 2014. (The name of this article's author is here.)
- ^ DuBois (1998), pp. 100, 119, 120
- ^ Stanton, Anthony, Gage, Harper (1881–1922), Vol. 2, p. 599
- ^ DuBois (1998), pp. 100, 122
- ^ DuBois, ed. (1992), pp. 101–06
- ^ Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull's sexual revolution: Political theater and the popular press in nineteenth-century America (2011).
- ^ a b Ann D. Gordon. "The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: Legal Questions Before the Federal Courts". Federal Judicial Center. Retrieved December 31, 2013. This article also points out that Supreme Court rulings did not establish the connection between citizenship and voting rights until the mid-twentieth century.
- ISBN 9780195176612.
- ^ Anthony, Susan B. "Susan B. Anthony's speech before the circuit court". Federal Judicial Center. Retrieved December 31, 2013.
- ^ Johnson, Katanga (August 18, 2020). "Trump says he will posthumously pardon U.S. women's rights activist Susan B. Anthony". Reuters. Retrieved August 18, 2020.
- ^ Seiger, Theresa (August 18, 2020). "Trump says he plans to pardon Susan B. Anthony". WFTV. Archived from the original on December 6, 2020. Retrieved August 18, 2020.
- ISBN 0-8160-4100-8
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 165
- ISBN 978-0814756768.
- ^ Ginzberg (2009), p. 120
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 190–91
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 218
- ISBN 0-8147-5834-7. Lockwood ran for president again in 1888.
- ^ Dubois and Dumenil (2009), p. 326
- ^ "An Act Conferring upon Women the Elective Franchise", approved February 12, 1870. Acts, Resolutions and Memorials of the Territory of Utah, Passed at the Nineteenth Annual Session of the Legislature, 1870, p. 8.
- ^ Society, Kansas State Historical (1912). Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society.
- ^ Dubois and Dumenil (2009), pp. 412–13
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 168
- S2CID 158399637.
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 174–176
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 207
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 173
- ^ American Federation of Labor, William Clark Roberts compiler, American Federation of Labor: History, Encyclopedia, Reference Book, 1919, p. 367. Washington, D.C.
- ISBN 9781733089111.
- ^ Gordon (2009). pp. xxv, 55
- ^ Dudden (2011), p. 12.
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 163–65
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 208–9
- ^ ISBN 0-87049-836-3
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 213
- ^ Dubois, ed. (1992) pp. 178–80
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 228, 231
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 212–13
- ^ Dubois, ed. (1992) pp. 182, 188–91
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), p. 22
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), pp. 24–25
- ^ Stephen M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois, 1850–1920 (1986) pp 154–57
- ^ Graham (1996), pp. 36–37
- ^ Dubois, ed. (1992) p. 178
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 231–232
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), pp. 25, 31
- ^ Graham (1996), pp. 81, 86
- ^ Tsiang, I-Mien (1942). The question of expatriation in America prior to 1907. Johns Hopkins Press. p. 114. OCLC 719352.
- ^ "Mackenzie v. Hare".
- ^ Martin, David A. (Spring 2005). "Dual Nationality: TR's 'Self-Evident Absurdity'". UVA Lawyer. Retrieved June 12, 2012.
- ^ MacKenzie v. Hare, 239 U.S. 299, 17, 20, 22 (1915).
- ^ "Massachusetts Women's Suffrage for Local Elections Advisory Question (1895)". Ballotpedia. Retrieved October 2, 2023.
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), p. 25
- ^ "Error – Error". webso.iup.edu. Retrieved April 4, 2019.
- ISBN 9780549564379. Archived from the originalon June 17, 2016.
- ISBN 9780674040090.
- ISBN 9780814774663.
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 252, 271
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 294
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 247, 282, 290
- ^ Ronald Schaffer, "The New York City Woman Suffrage Party, 1909–1919." New York History (1962): 269–287. in JSTOR
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 263–64, 290
- ^ James J. Kenneally, "Catholicism and Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts." Catholic Historical Review (1967): 43–57 in JSTOR
- ^ "The Uprising of the Women," New York Times May 5, 1912, quoted in Sandra Adickes, "Sisters, not demons: The influence of British suffragists on the American Suffrage Movement," Women's History Review (2002) 11#4 pp: 675–690 at p 681
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 223
- ISBN 0618001824.
- ^ Susan Goodier, No votes for women: the New York state anti-suffrage movement (University of Illinois Press, 2013) pp. 85–86.
- ^ "A Creed" by Josephine Jewell Dodge, 1915, cited in Susan Goodier, The other woman's movement: Anti-suffrage activism in New York State, 1865–1932 (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Albany, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2007) p. 1
- ^ Goodier (2013) ch. 6
- ^ Kenneth R. Johnson, "Kate Gordon and the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the South," Journal of Southern History (1972) 38#3 pp 365–392
- ^ Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (1971) pp. 12–18
- ^ Arkansas also ratified. A. Elizabeth Taylor, "A short history of the woman suffrage movement in Tennessee." Tennessee Historical Quarterly (1943) pp: 195–215. in JSTOR
- ISBN 9780195359572.
- ^ Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (1997) p 52
- ^ Wheeler (1993), pp. 113–14
- ^ Wheeler (1993), pp.114–18, 177
- ^ Evelyn A. Kirkley, "'This Work is God's Cause': Religion in the Southern Woman Suffrage Movement, 1880–1920." Church history (1990) 59#4 pp: 507–522 esp p 508
- ^ Wheeler (1993), pp.121, 120
- ^ Kraditor (1965). footnote p. 164.
- ^ Wheeler, ed. (1995). p. 147.
- ^ Wheeler, ed. (1995). p. 31-32.
- ^ Zahniser and Fry (2014). p. 140.
- ^ "Exhibition Items Seneca Falls and Building a Movement, 1776–1890 Early Feminist Inspirations". Library of Congress.
- ^ "#19SuffrageStories Countdown: Stories 14 to 10". Smithsonian Because of Her. August 10, 2020. Retrieved October 1, 2020.
- ^ "Colored women in Suffrage Parade". The Times Dispatch. March 2, 1913. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
- ^ Fry, Amelia (1976). "Suffragists Oral History Project Conversations with Alice Paul: Woman Suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment Alice Paul". Online Archive of California. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
- ^ Dubois, William Edward Burghardt (April 1913). "Suffrage Paraders". Google Books.
- ^ a b c "Colored Women in Suffrage Parade" (PDF). Richmond, Virginia): The Times-Dispatch. March 2, 1913. p. 2. Archived (PDF) from the original on May 11, 2017. Retrieved March 29, 2017.
- ^ Gallagher, Robert A. (1974). "I Was Arrested, Of Course". American Heritage. 25 (2): 20.
- ^ Harvey, Sheridan. "Marching for the Vote: Remembering the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913". American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States. Library of Congress. Retrieved January 21, 2019.
- ^ a b Zahniser and Fry (2014). p. 144.
- ^ a b Zahniser and Fry (2014). p. 149.
- ^ Walton (2010), p. 72
- ISBN 978-0-19-932917-5. Retrieved May 28, 2020.
- ^ New York World, February 2, 1896, quoted in Harper (1898–1908), Vol. 2. p. 859
- ^ Quoted in Schultz (2013), p. 33
- ^ Schultz (2013), p. 30
- ^ "Maud Wood Park". Britannica Online Encyclopedia. Retrieved July 15, 2014.
- ISBN 978-0-415-99776-8
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 242–51
- ^ Frost-Knappman and Cullen-DuPont (2009), p. 304
- ISBN 978-0-295-99086-6.
- ^ "Who Is the League of Women Voters?". League of Women Voters. Retrieved May 18, 2023.
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 255–57
- ^ Ward (1999), pp. 214–15
- ^ "Senators to Vote on Suffrage Today; Fate of Susan B. Anthony Amendment Hangs in Balance on Eve of Final Test". The New York Times. September 26, 1918.
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), pp. 31–32
- ^ Fowler (1986), p. 146
- ^ Walton (2010), pp. 133, 158
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), pp. 32–33
- ^ "National Woman's Party 1912–1922: Timeline Story Map".
- ^ Case, Sarah H. "Woman Suffrage in the Southern States". Series: The 19th Amendment and Women's Access to the Vote Across America. National Park Service. U.S. Department of the Interior. Retrieved September 17, 2019.
- ^ Tyler, Pamela. "Woman Suffrage". 64 Parishes. Encyclopedia of Louisiana. Retrieved September 17, 2019.
- ^ Hollingsworth, Randolph. "Debate between Laura Clay and Madeline McDowell Breckinridge over the Anthony Amendment". H-Kentucky. H-Net.org. Retrieved September 17, 2019.
- ^ Rakow and Kramarae eds. (2001), pp. 14–18
- ^ McMillen (2008), p. 210
- ^ McMillen (2008), pp. 208, 224
- ^ Fowler (1986), pp. 117, 119
- ^ Walton (2010), pp. 88, 96–97
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), p. 166
- ^ "Timeline and Map of Woman Suffrage Legislation State by State 1838–1919".
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), pp. 28–29
- ^ Graham (1996), pp. 57, 112–13
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), pp. 38–39
- ^ Graham (1996), pp. 84–85, 88
- ^ Fowler (1986), p. 143
- ^ Graham (1996), p. 87
- ^ Fowler (1986), pp. 118–19
- ^ Flexner (1959), p. 275
- ^ Walton (2010), pp. 171–72
- ^ Walton (2010), p. 187
- ^ Defending The Ballot Box (audio interview with Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law)
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 277–78
- ^ Walton (2010), pp. 192, 194, 200, 207
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 276, 280–81
- ^ Norma Smith, Jeannette Rankin, America's Conscience (Montana Historical Society, 2002)
- ^ Scott and Scott (1982), p. 41
- ^ The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson: War and peace, Baker and Dodd (eds.), p. 265, quoted in Flexner (1959), p. 302
- ^ DuBois, Ellen Carol (April 20, 2020). "A pandemic nearly derailed the women's suffrage movement". National Geographic. Archived from the original on April 21, 2020. Retrieved April 27, 2020.
- ^ The record of the Leslie Woman Suffrage Commission, Inc., 1917–1929, by Rose Young, posted on the web by the Library of Congress.
- ^ Graham (1996), p. 146
- ^ Susan Zeiger, "She didn't raise her boy to be a slacker: Motherhood, conscription, and the culture of the First World War." Feminist Studies (1996): 7–39. in JSTOR
- ^ Flexner (1959), pp. 302, 381 n. 6
- .
- ^ "National Woman's Party: a year-by-year history 1913–1922".
- ^ "On passage of H. J. Res. 1, proposing to the state legislatures a woman's suffrage amendment to the constitution. (P.1483)".
- JSTOR 2150609.
- OCLC 813298690. (Quote from abstract.)
- ^ "S652146 Y=53, N=31 JONES, N.M. TO PASS H.J. RES. 200".
- ^ "S653037 Y=55, N=29 JONES, N.M. TO PASS H.J. RES. 200".
- ^ "To pass H.J. Res. 1, proposing an amendment to the constitution extending the right to suffrage of women. (P. 78-2)".
- ^ "S661014 Y=56, N=25 WATSON, IND. TO PASS HJR 1".
- JSTOR 42626045.
- ISBN 9781299008762. Details.
- ^ ISBN 9780870498374.
- ISBN 9780820340227.
- ISBN 9780820333939. Preview.
- ^ a b Morris, Mildred (August 19, 1920). "Tennessee Fails to Reconsider Suffrage Vote — Fight for All Rights Still Facing Women". The Washington Times. p. 1. Morris is writer for "Fight for All Rights..." article only.
- ^ Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (1995) pp 98–144
- ^ Kristi Andersen, After Suffrage: Women in Partisan and Electoral Politics before the New Deal (1996)
- ^ Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (1979)
- ^ a b McConnaughy 2013, p. 251.
- ^ Kerber 1998, p. 11.
- ^ Hacker 2014, pp. 57–58.
- ^ a b Arnold 2011, pp. 413–415.
- ^ Van Dyne 1904, pp. 56–61.
- ^ Arnold 2011, pp. 415–416.
- ^ Van Dyne 1904, p. 56.
- ^ Deloria & Lytle 1983, p. 222.
- ^ Hacker 2014, pp. 60–61.
- ^ National Academy of Sciences & National Research Council 2008, p. 23.
- ^ Carlson 2007, p. 262.
- ^ McConnaughy 2013, pp. 251–252.
- ^ Valk & Brown 2010, p. 140.
- ^ Cartagena 2017, p. 218.
- ^ Podolefsky 2014, p. 843.
- ^ Podolefsky 2014, pp. 846–847.
- ^ Hacker 2014, p. 61.
- ^ "Myths About the 19th Amendment and Women's Suffrage Debunked | Time". August 18, 2020.
- ^ "Report: Obstacles at Every Turn".
- ^ "100 Years After Suffrage, Native American Women Still Fighting to Vote – Women's Media Center".
- ^ "How the Native American Vote Continues to be Suppressed".
- ^ "What does Equal Suffrage mean? | History Colorado".
- ^ "Today in History – June 2". Library of Congress.
- ^ "Could Women of Color Vote in the 1870 election? | WyoHistory.org".
- ^ Terborg-Penn 1998, p. 48.
- ^ a b Terborg-Penn 1998, p. 49.
- ^ Clark 1975, p. 43.
- ^ Clark 1975, p. 42.
- ^ Torres Rivera 2009.
- ^ Rivera López 2016, pp. 536–537.
- ^ Rivera Lassén 2010, pp. 42–43.
- ^ Rivera López 2016, pp. 525–526.
- ^ Rivera Lassén 2010, p. 43.
- ^ Terborg-Penn 1998, p. 50.
- Newspapers.com.
- ^ Clark 1975, pp. 43–45.
- ^ Roy-Féquière 2004, p. 75.
- ^ Terborg-Penn 1987, pp. 58–59.
- ^ a b Terborg-Penn 1998, p. 53.
- ^ Terborg-Penn 1987, pp. 59–60.
- ^ Carano & Sanchez 1980, pp. 176, 178.
- ^ Morra 1991, p. 9.
- ^ a b Morra 1991, p. 10.
- ^ "Current Numbers". Center for American Women and Politics. June 12, 2015. Retrieved August 19, 2019.
- ^ "Women in National Parliaments". ipu.org. Inter-Parliamentary Union.
- ^ "Kamala Harris, daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, elected nation's first female vice president". The Washington Post.
- ^ Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s, Hill and Wang, (1995)
- John R. Lott and Lawrence W. Kenny, "Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?", Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago, 1999, vol. 107, no. 6, pt. 1
- ^ S2CID 236623774.
- ^ a b c d Rouse, Wendy. "The Very Queer History of the Suffrage Movement". Women's Vote Centennial 1920–2020. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
- ^ ISBN 9780674986688.
- ^ Salam, Maya (August 14, 2020). "How Queer Women Powered the Suffrage Movement". The New York Times. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
- ISBN 039585010X.
- ^ Jabour, Anya (January 24, 2020). "When Lesbians Led the Women's Suffrage Movement". The Conversation: Academic rigor, journalistic flair. Retrieved September 2, 2020.
- JSTOR 3346519.
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- ISBN 978-0-309-17858-7.
- Neuman, Johanna. And yet they persisted: how American women won the right to vote (2020) excerpt.
- Podolefsky, Ronnie L. (February 2014). "Illusion of Suffrage: Female Voting Rights and the Women's Poll Tax Repeal Movement after the Nineteenth Amendment". ISSN 0745-3515. Retrieved July 9, 2020.
- ISBN 978-0-415-25689-6.
- ISSN 0041-851X. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 15, 2019. Retrieved November 18, 2019.
- Rivera López, Lizbeth L. (2016). Las aportaciones sociales y periodísticas de las mujeres en Puerto Rico: desde la llegada de la imprenta en los primeros años del siglo XIX hasta el primer tercio del siglo XX [The Social and Journalistic Contributions of Women in Puerto Rico: From the Arrival of the Printing Press in the First Years of the 19th Century until the First Third of the 20th Century] (PDF) (PhD). Madrid, Spain: Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 15, 2019. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
- Roy-Féquière, Magali (2004). Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-century Puerto Rico. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: ISBN 978-1-59213-231-7.
- Schultz, Jaime (2013). "The Physical is Political: Women's Suffrage, Pilgrim Hikes and the Public Sphere", in Women, Sport, Society: Further Reflections, Reaffirming Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Roberta J. Park and Patricia Vertinsky. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9781317985808
- ISBN 0-252-01005-1.
- Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Anthony, Susan B.; Gage, Matilda Joslyn; Harper, Ida (1881–1922). History of Woman Suffrage in six volumes. Rochester, NY: Susan B. Anthony (Charles Mann Press).
- Teele, Dawn Langan. Forging the Franchise: The Political Origins of the Women's Vote (2018) Online review
- Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn (1998). "Enfranchising Women of Color: Woman Suffragists as Agents of Imperialism". In Pierson, Ruth Roach; Chaudhuri, Nupur; McAuley, Beth (eds.). Nation, Empire, Colony: Historicizing Gender and Race. Bloomington, Indiana: ISBN 0-253-11386-5.
- Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn (1987). "African Feminism: A Theoretical Approach to the History of Women in the African Diaspora". In Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn; Harley, Sharon; Rushing, Andrea Benton (eds.). Women in Africa and the African Diaspora. Washington, D. C.: ISBN 0-88258-171-6.
- Torres Rivera, Juan (2009). "Genara Pagán de Arce". Puerta de Tierra (in Spanish). San Juan, Puerto Rico. Archived from the original on November 15, 2019. Retrieved November 17, 2019.
- Valk, Anne; Brown, Leslie (2010). Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South. New York, New York: ISBN 978-0-230-10987-2.
- Van Dyne, Frederick (1904). Citizenship of the United States. Rochester, New York: Lawyers' Co-operative Publishing Companyo. OCLC 1147861787.
- Venet, Wendy Hamand (1991). Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. ISBN 978-0813913421.
- Walton, Mary (2010). A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-61175-7.
- Ward, Geoffrey C., with essays by ISBN 0-375-40560-7.
- Wellman, Judith (2004). The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Women's Rights Convention, University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-02904-6.
- Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill (1993). New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-507583-8.
Anti-suffrage
- Benjamin, Anne M. (1992). A History of the Anti-Suffrage Movement in the United States from 1895 to 1920. Edwin Mellen Press.
- Goodier, Susan. (2013). No votes for women: the New York state anti-suffrage movement. University of Illinois Press. p. chapter summary. ISBN 9780252094675.
- Brannon-Wranosky, essica (October 2014). Review of Goodier, Susan, No Votes for Women: The New York State Anti-Suffrage Movement.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - Green, Elna C. (1999). "From Antisuffragism to Anti-Communism: The Conservative Career of Ida M. Darden". Journal of Southern History. 65 (2): 287–316. JSTOR 2587365.
- Jablonsky, Thomas J. (1994). The home, heaven, and mother party: Female anti-suffragists in the United States, 1868–1920. Carlson Pub.
- Kenneally, James J. (1967). Catholicism and Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts. Vol. 8. Catholic Historical Review. pp. 43–57.
- Maddux, Kristy (2004). When Patriots Protest: The Anti-Suffrage Discursive Transformation of 1917. Vol. 7. Rhetoric and Public Affairs. pp. 283–310.
- Marshall, Susan E. (1997). Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage. University of Wisconsin Press.
- McConnaughy, Corrine M. (2013). The Woman Suffrage Movement in America: A Reassessment. New York, New York: ISBN 978-1-107-43396-0.
- ISBN 978-0-8142-0882-3.
- Palczewski, Catherine H. (2005). The male Madonna and the feminine Uncle Sam: Visual argument, icons, and ideographs in 1909 anti-woman suffrage postcards. Vol. 91. pp. 365–394.
{{cite book}}
:|work=
ignored (help) - Stevenson, Louise L. (1979). "Women Anti-Suffragists in the 1915 Massachusetts Campaign". New England Quarterly. 52 (1): 80–93. JSTOR 364357.
- Thurner, Manuela. (1993). "'Better Citizens Without the Ballot': American AntiSuffrage Women and Their Rationale During the Progressive Era". Journal of Women's History. 5 (1): 33–60. S2CID 144309053.
- Vacca, Carolyn Summers (2004). A reform against nature: woman suffrage and the rethinking of American citizenship, 1840–1920. Peter Lang.
Primary sources
- ISBN 1-55553-143-1.
- ISBN 978-0-312-46888-0.
- ISBN 0-8135-2317-6.
- ISBN 0-8135-2318-4.
- ISBN 978-0-8135-2321-7.
Further reading
- Cassidy, Tina. Mr. President, how Long Must We Wait?: Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote (2019).
- Knobe, Bertha Damaris (August 1911). "Recent Strides Of Woman Suffrage". The World's Work: A History of Our Time. XXII (1): 14733–14745. Retrieved July 10, 2009.
- Wall, Meneese (2020). ISBN 9781734901009.
- Weiss, Elaine (2018). ISBN 9780143128991.
External links
- Timeline and Map of Woman Suffrage Legislation State by State 1838-1919
- The Vote – PBS American Experience documentary
- Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party
- Detailed Chronology of National Woman's Party
- Database of National Woman's Party Actions Outside Washington D.C. 1914–1924
- National Woman's Party Offices and Actions (Washington D.C. map)
- National Woman's Party: a year-by-year history 1913–1922
- National Woman's Party 1912–1922: Timeline Story Map
- UNCG Special Collections and University Archives selections of American Suffragette manuscripts
- International Woman Suffrage Timeline: Winning the Vote for Women Around the World Archived August 23, 2016, at the About.com
- The Liberator Files, Items concerning women's rights from Horace Seldon's collection and summary of research of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator original copies at the Boston Public Library, Boston, Massachusetts.
- The Sewall-Belmont House & Museum—Home of the historic National Woman's Party
- Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman's Party
- Women's suffrage in the United States from 1908–1918:Select "Suffrage" subject, at the Persuasive Cartography, The PJ Mode Collection, Cornell University Library
- 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution from the Library of Congress
- Maurer, Elizabeth. "Pathways to Equality: The U.S. Women's Rights Movement Emerges". National Women's History Museum. 2014.
- Mayo, Edith P. "Creating a Female Political Culture". National Women's History Museum. 2017.
- Digitized items from the National American Women's Suffrage Collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress
- Scrabooks of Newspaper Clippings compiled by the Woman Suffrage Party of Greater Cleveland compiled between 1911 and 1920, available from Cleveland Public Library
- Newspaper articles and clippings about U.S. Women's Suffrage at Newspapers.com
- "Women of Color and the Fight for Women's Suffrage", CCSWG