A History of Woman Suffrage

1. A History of Woman Suffrage 1848-1920

2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), with daughter Harriet c. 1856. Lucretia Mott (1793-1880)

3. July 1848: Seneca Falls Convention • Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott •  Abolitionists fought for women’s rights •  Declaration of Sentiments written “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal…” from the Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

4. "He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.“

6. Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) • Quaker temperance activist and abolitionist who was silenced in both movements because of her sex. • Joined Stanton in the late 1850s and focused work on women’s rights. • Never married so that she could focus life work on reform activism.

7. The Negroes’ Hour • Many in the abolitionist and “Equal Rights” movements put civil rights of African-American males ahead of those of women regardless of race. • African American men’s civil rights more attainable • Public not ready for women’s equality • Suffragists had hoped that women and blacks would gain the vote at the same time and felt betrayed by those abolitionists who chose to support the concept of the "Negroes' Hour.“

8. Stanton and Anthony form the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), for the single purpose of advancing the political cause of their own sex, in 1869

9. NWSA Executive Committee, 1869

10. Lucy Stone (1815-1903), suffrage leader Reformer, lecturer, editor, women's rights advocate, abolitionist Opposed Stanton and Anthony on the 15th Amendment Headed the American Woman Suffrage Association

11. From 1869, movement for woman's rights went forward along several paths: • the narrowing focus on suffrage, • the byways of racism and nativism, and • an increasing recourse to domestic and feminine rhetoric.

12. 1872: Susan B. Anthony votes •  Arrested for illegal voting • Supreme Court decides states can deny women the vote “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” Susan B. Anthony after her arrest for illegal voting, 1872

13. 1874: WCTU formed • Women’s Christian • Temperance Union • Fought for temperance and suffrage • Wanted vote to protect families

14. 1890: NAWSA formed • Led by Stanton and Anthony • State by state strategy • Some Western states give women the vote From Arizona, 1912

15. Mrs. Henry M. Youmans of Waukesha, WI, president of Wisconsin Women's Suffrage Association

16. “Social Housekeeping” • Women could be counted upon to use their votes to do the civic work that they did in their own households • If allowed to vote, they would: • teach children • clean up urban messes • care for the sick and elderly • create a more humane and less corrupt society

17. Jane Addams & Social Housekeeping “[Life in] the modern city is ... going badly [because] the quickly-congregated population has not yet learned to arrange its affairs satisfactorily. Unsanitary housing, poisonous sewage, contaminated water, infant mortality, the spread of contagion, adulterated food, impure milk, smoke-laden air, ill ventilated factories, dangerous occupations, juvenile crime, unwholesome crowding, prostitution and drunkenness are the enemies which the modem cities must face and overcome, would they survive. Logically their electorate should be made up of those who can bear a valiant part in this arduous context, those who in the past have at least attempted to care for children, to clean houses, to prepare foods, to isolate the family from moral dangers.... Jane Addams, 1860-1935

18. Racism and Ethnocentricity • Olympia Brown's comments to the NWSA Convention in Washington D.C. in January 1889: "The last census shows, I think, that there are in the United States three times as many American-born women as the whole foreign population, men and women together, so that the votes of women will eventually be the only means of overcoming this foreign influence and maintaining our free institutions. There is no possible safety for our free school, our free church or our republican government, unless women are given the suffrage and that right speedily.... Olympia Brown, 1835-1926

19. Olympia Brown’s comments, continued: “…Our American women are property holders and pay large taxes; but the foreigner who has lived only one year in the State, and ten days in the precinct, who does not own a foot of land, may vote away their property in the form of taxes in the most reckless manner, regardless of their interests and their rights. Women are well-educated; they are graduating from our colleges; they are reading and thinking and writing; and yet they are the political inferiors of all the riff-raff of Europe that is poured upon our shores. It is unbearable, there is no language that can express the enormous injustice done to women. . . . . . .We are in danger in this country of Catholic domination, not because the Catholics are more numerous than we are, but because the Catholic church is represented at the polls and the Protestant church is not. The foreigners are Catholic – the greater portion of them; the foreigners are men – the greater part of them, and members of the Catholic Church, and they work for it and vote for it. The Protestant church is composed of women. Men for the most part do not belong to it; they do not care much for it except as something to interest the women of their household. The consequence is the Protestant church is comparatively unrepresented at the ballotbox."

20. • Suffrage leaders reflected the racial attitudes which characterized a large segment of the white middle-class. • • Many suffragists described the female vote as a way of maintaining white supremacy • –white, educated women would outnumber black votes • • This became a very popular argument in the South • – where women called for white women's vote • – and talked about 4 million "semibarbaric exslaves“ who had to be overcome.

21. Suffrage leaders reflected the racial attitudes which characterized a large segment of the white middle-class. • Many suffragists described the female vote as a way of maintaining white supremacy • white, educated women would outnumber black votes • This became a very popular argument in the South • where women called for white women's vote • and talked about 4 million "semibarbaric exslaves“ who had to be overcome.

22. Belle Kearney, "The South and Woman Suffrage," NWSA Convention, New Orleans, March 1903: “The enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained, for upon unquestioned authority it is stated that in every southern State but one there are more educated women than all the illiterate voters, white and black, native and foreign, combined. As you probably know, of all the women in the South who can read and write, ten out of every eleven are white. When it comes to the proportion of property between the races, that of the white outweighs that of the black immeasurably. The South is slow to grasp the great fact that the enfranchisement of women would settle the race question in politics. Belle Kearney, 1863-1939

23. “…The civilization of the North is threatened by the influx of foreigners with their imported customs; by the greed of monopolistic wealth and the unrest among the working classes; by the strength of the liquor traffic and encroachments upon religious belief. Some day the North will be compelled to look to the South for redemption from those evils on account of the purity of its Anglo- Saxon blood, the simplicity of its social and economic structure, the great advance in prohibitory law and the maintenance of the sanctity of its faith, which has been kept inviolate. Just as surely as the North will be forced to turn to the South for the nation's salvation, just so surely will the South be compelled to look to its Anglo-Saxon women as the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African.”

24. African-American Women and Suffrage • In 1896, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Margaret Murray Washington, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, and former slave Harriet Tubman met in Washington, D.C., to form the National Association of Colored Women (NACW)

25. Ida B. Wells-Barnett “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome, a great one, true, her sex; a colored woman faces two-her sex and her race.” -- Mary Church Terrell Mary Church Terrell

26. Charlotte Forten Grimké Margaret Murray Washington

27. Final Stage, 1890-1920 • Mass movement made up of mostly young women who identify as “New Women” • Explicitly feminist: • Women deserve the vote as a basic human right • Women assume equality in their methods and arguments • Willingness to be “unladylike” in the fight • Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (NWP)

28. Carrie Lane Chapman Catt (1859-1947), women's suffrage leader c. 1896

29. Carrie Chapman Catt and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA)

30. Alice Paul and the Congressional Union

31. Alice Paul joined in the suffragists movement in Great Britain and is imprisoned three times. • With fellow American Lucy Burns Paul went on hunger strikes and was force-fed. • Alice Paul and Lucy Burns gave a new direction to the women’s rights movement in the United States. • In 1916, Paul and Burns organized the National Woman’s Party (NWP) • adopted the radical tactics of the British suffragettes • campaigned for the first Equal Rights Amendment. Alice Paul (1885-1977), women's suffrage leader c. 1905

32. Importance of Publicity in Building a Mass Movement: • Congressional Union, under the leadership of Alice Paul, split off from NAWSA in 1913 and had special appreciation use of publicity and means planting material in press. • Created own paper (The Suffragist), and sent press releases and photos to newspapers. • NAWSA had own publicity apparatus including a publishing company. • By WWI even state suffrage organizations had publicity departments which furnished material to newspapers and magazines.

33. Also copied advertising, particularly publicity stunts. • In 1909 Massachusetts suffragists began crisscrossing the commonwealth in cars, trolleys, and trains. • One went up in balloon, circus manager agreed to put “Votes for Women” banner on elephant, suffrage float appeared in July 4th parades. • In California, suffragists put on plays, pageants, concerts and social functions, hung huge electric signs, spoke at vaudeville shows and got Hollywood's attention in newsreels. • Began to hold large rallies, street meetings, parades, and marches.

34. Headquarters of an Anti-Suffrage Group (c.1910) • Opposition to the goal of women’s suffrage came from many arenas. Some objected because they believed that women would only duplicate the voting of their husbands, while others believed that women were unable to exert the rational thought that voting required.

35. Anti-Suffrage Pamphlet (c.1910) • “Housewives! • You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout. A handful of potash and some boiling water is quicker and cheaper… • Why vote for pure food laws, when your husband does that, while you can purify your Ice-box with saleratus water?” • “Vote NO on Woman Suffrage • BECAUSE 90% of the women either do not want it, or do not care. • BECAUSE it means competition of women with men instead of co-operation. • BECAUSE 80% of the women eligible to vote are married and can only double or annul their husband’s votes… • BECAUSE in some States more voting women than voting men will place the Government under petticoat rule. • BECAUSE it is unwise to risk the good we already have for the evil which may occur. “

36. Opposition to Women’s Suffrage: • Liquor Lobby feared it would lead to Prohibition • Industrialists feared women would support labor reforms • Belief that women belong in the home

37. Poster warns: "Danger! Woman's Suffrage Would Double the Irresponsible Vote“ c. 1912

38. Parading for Suffrage "I saw the possibilities in a suffrage parade. What could be more stirring than hundreds of women, carrying banners, marching--marching--marching! The public would be aroused, the press would spread the story far and wide, and the interest of our own workers would be stirred.” Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940)

39. Suffrage parade, New York City, May 6, 1912

40. Head of suffrage parade, Washington, D.C., March 3, 1913

41. Inez Milholland

43. Some suffragists explored more radical tactics • There were some politics of confrontation -- largely by Congressional Union and the National Woman’s Party, which picketed White House, heckled president, climbed statues, burned Wilson's words and were imprisoned. • Many of the women engaged in such activities were working class, hardened by labor strikes and actions; • Some were immigrants with backgrounds in the harsher, bloodier politics of Europe.

44. NWP’s “Silent Sentinals”

46. Virginia Arnold holding Kaiser Wilson banner, August 1917

47. Protests Lead to Arrest • Picketers were arrested for “obstructing traffic.” • Many including Alice Paul were convicted, incarcerated, and tortured at Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. • In protest of conditions Alice Paul commenced a hunger strike with others later joining her. She and other were force-fed with "The Stomach Tube."

48. NWP Marchers about to be arrested Abby Scott Baker in prison dress, 1917

49. Lucy Burns, Vice Chairman Congressional Union, in Occoquan Workhouse, November 1917

50. Mary Winsor (PA) holding Suffrage Prisoners banner, October 1917.jpg