But back to Seneca Falls, briefly. Douglass was the only male speaker. He was one of twenty-two men who signed the Declaration of Sentiments.
Douglass was all-in for women’s rights, including women’s economic rights. But when it came to the Fifteenth Amendment, he had a terrible falling out with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and a few other great leaders of women’s suffrage.
DR: You say in your book he was the most-photographed man of the nineteenth century. Why did he never smile?
DB: I think Douglass smiled a lot, just not on camera. You had to sit for way too long to be photographed. Douglass used this modern new invention to create his own image. He manipulated photographers. His sternness in many of his photographs had a lot to do with how he wanted to present himself. There is one late photo of Douglass in old age where he is cracking a smile.
DR: When did he die?
DB: In 1895, at the age of seventy-seven. He had a heart attack. He had heart disease for some time, though I can’t prove that. There was no cardiology yet. Douglass died of a heart attack in early evening on a day in February 1895, just after returning from downtown and attending a women’s rights convention. Eulogies and tributes appeared in all parts of the country for many weeks.
ELAINE WEISS on Women’s Suffrage
Journalist; author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote and other books
“One thing we have to understand is that the idea of women’s rights actually stems from the abolition movement…. The idea of all humans having the divine spark and having the right to freedom and a voice in their government really comes out of abolition.”
Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent rhetoric in the Declaration of Independence’s preamble had two glaring omissions, one unstated and one stated. The unstated omission was that the “all men” who were to receive the blessings of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” were to be white men. The stated omission was that women were not entitled to these same blessings.
So it was not a surprise that when, eleven years later, the Constitution was drafted by fifty-five white men and ratified by the states’ white men shortly thereafter, the system of slavery was essentially endorsed by the document. Nor was it a surprise that no words in the Constitution, or the subsequently adopted Bill of Rights, referred to the rights of women.
The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 adopted a resolution, though not without dissent, supporting women’s suffrage, and that is often seen as the unofficial launching pad for the women’s suffrage movement in the United States. That a constitutional amendment granting such a vote was not finally ratified until August of 1920—more than seventy years later—demonstrates how politically controversial women’s suffrage turned out to be. What was the controversy?
Of course, those who have power generally are not in favor of surrendering it. And thus the men in the country did not see how their power or ability to control political or social events would be helped by allowing women to vote.
In the face of these arguments, the suffragist leaders—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt, Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Sojourner Truth, among many others—worked tirelessly to develop the requisite political support for a constitutional amendment after their earlier legal efforts had failed to persuade the Supreme Court that the existing Constitution already permitted women to vote.
The effort to get Congress to pass the requisite constitutional amendment was a hard-fought political undertaking, not aided by the fact that a fair number of women, including some prominent figures, initially opposed the amendment. But Congress finally approved what became the Nineteenth Amendment in June of 1919.
Three-quarters of the states—thirty-six out of forty-eight at the time—had to ratify the amendment. So the political arguments that had been raised by both sides in the halls of Congress were then shifted to the houses of the state legislatures. The outcome was hardly a foregone conclusion. Many southern states in particular opposed the amendment, arguing in part that the amendment would disrupt the southern way of life by giving Black women the right to vote.
By August of 1920, thirty-five states had approved the amendment, but the number of states likely to approve was dwindling. One southern state, Tennessee, was thought to be a possible supporter, and the combined lobbying forces of both sides moved to Tennessee as its legislature began to consider the amendment.
What happened there is retold in great novelistic style by Elaine Weiss in The Woman’s Hour, one of many interesting books that were published around the centenary anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification. Weiss is a well-respected journalist and media commentator specializing in issues relating to women’s rights and political activities.
I interviewed her about the battle for suffrage for the New-York Historical Society on September 25, 2020. In recounting the vote in the Tennessee legislature, Elaine Weiss helps to remind readers that the right to vote is seen by Americans as a necessary prerequisite to meaningful citizenship.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): It’s hard to believe women didn’t have the right to vote for so much of our country’s history. We’ll go through that, but let’s talk a little bit about your own background. What prompted you to write this book?
ELAINE WEISS (EW): I’m a politically aware and engaged American woman and voter, and I realized I did not know how it was that I, as an American woman, had obtained the right to vote. I knew that it was not in the Constitution when our country began, and then at some point it was. I asked some friends, who are very well-educated men and women, and they also looked at me kind of blankly and shrugged and said, “Oh, Seneca Falls.”
I realized we really don’t know this. It’s not in our popular sense of our history. I wanted to explore it. While beginning my research, I came upon a report in the Library of Congress that explained how a bequest to the suffrage movement in 1914 had been spent. It described the ratification fight, because that’s how some of the money had to be allocated, and it talked about the last state to ratify, which was Tennessee.
The story that this little bureaucratic report in the Library of Congress described was so dramatic and almost wild that I knew that this was a great story. What I realized is that by focusing in on this last battle in Tennessee, in the summer of 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was being decided, I could tell a larger story about democracy, about voting rights, and about the history of women’s struggle for this.
DR: What was the principle argument that men used against giving women the right to vote?
EW: In this crusade for the vote, we’re asking men to share power. There’s a natural opposition to that, not only in the political classes but in American homes, because men were used to women having a subservient role. It’s in much of our religious tradition, certainly in our civic tradition.
Men said, “Women are too fragile. They’re not bright enough. Women can’t handle the rough and tumble of politics. They can’t conceptualize public policy.”
They were using this rather patronizing idea of what women could and could not do in order to say, “She can’t deal with important issues like who to vote for and what our nation’s policies should be.”
The other argument was that if a woman was able to vote, she might think she was socially equal too. And this was going to disrupt what they considered the natural order of things, which was patriarchy.
So men used a variety of descriptions of women to advocate that they shouldn’t be able to vote. Clergymen used the idea that this went against God’s plan, because he had made Adam to be dominant over Eve, and to question that was an abomination. So you have interesting approaches that men took besides just raw political power.
DR: Why did some women not feel they should have the right to vote?
EW: There were organized groups of women, even in 1920, who opposed the idea of women’s suffrage. In the beginning of the movement, in the mid-nineteenth century, al
most everyone was against this idea. It was considered a radical idea. The great majority of American men but also American women thought it was just too outrageous, this idea of women voting.
Slowly, slowly, the suffragists worked for decades to change hearts and minds about this, to change attitudes about what woman’s role should be and what her rights should be. By the dawn of the twentieth century, when the suffrage movement is beginning to make some real headway, that’s when you see women organizing and saying, “We don’t want to vote. It would be a burden upon us.”
Their reasoning often was: “This is going to disrupt the American family. It’s going to upend gender roles. Husbands and wives are going to argue and divorce will boom, because there’ll be disruption in the home.”
There was an idea that this was going to cause women to abandon the family. The antisuffrage women call the idea of suffrage “the moral collapse of the nation.” They see it in what we call culture-war terms, that this is going to affect private life as well as public life.
DR: One of the most progressive women in American history, certainly in the twentieth century, is thought to be Eleanor Roosevelt; yet early in her career she was opposed to women’s suffrage as well. How can that be explained?
EW: That was quite a shock when I came upon that in my research. Eleanor Roosevelt exemplifies a certain stratum of American woman who was very comfortable, comes from wealth, comes from connections. The status quo is just fine with them. Why shake things up?
A lot of the antisuffrage leadership comes from wealthy women whose husbands are congressmen, senators, mayors, professors, presidents of universities, who see no reason that uneducated women, factory women, women of all different classes, whom they consider below them, should have the right to vote.
Eleanor Roosevelt in 1920 is a thirtysomething young mother with five little children. Her husband’s a very ambitious politician. In fact, he’s running on the Democratic ticket for vice president in 1920, and yet she’s not sure how she feels about women’s suffrage.
She was never an antisuffragist in that she didn’t join them, though they courted her. She doesn’t join them, but she’s so insecure about what her role as a political wife should be that when New York women gain the right to vote through referendum in 1917, and can vote in 1918 for the first time, she refuses to vote.
After ratification in 1920, she joins the League of Women Voters, and she becomes a protégé of the great suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, and she begins becoming much more politically engaged. She serves on the League of Women Voters for many years.
So we see this evolution of her political consciousness. It’s really fascinating. Uncle Teddy’s in the White House. She didn’t really need to influence anyone else. But she comes to learn how important the vote is.
DR: In United States history, there’s always a racial overtone. What is the racial overtone here? Is it that with Black women and Black men voting, there might be too many Black votes in the South?
EW: It becomes one of the pivotal issues when it comes to ratification. Race was always part of the women’s suffrage movement, from the very beginning. One thing we have to understand is that the idea of women’s rights actually stems from the abolition movement. The women whom we consider the foremothers of this movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Lucretia Mott—are all abolition workers before they become suffrage workers. The idea of all humans having the divine spark and having the right to freedom and a voice in their government really comes out of abolition.
These are twin causes from the 1840s until after the Civil War. Then there’s a rift. The powers that be say, “Women cannot get the vote, only Black men will be accorded the vote by the Fifteenth Amendment,” and the suffragists feel betrayed.
DR: A hundred years after the ratification and certification of the Nineteenth Amendment, what does history show us? Do women vote in roughly the same percentages as men?
EW: They vote in larger percentages.
DR: And in the United States, there are more registered women voters than registered men. Is that true?
EW: We do know that women surpass men’s participation in voting, so I would say yes, because you have to be registered first. And that gap has been growing in the last few decades.
DR: There was a concern initially when this ratification effort was under way that women would vote much differently than men. They would, for example, be against railroads. The railroad industry was against women getting the right to vote because it was thought that somehow women would take away their power in the Congress. As it turned out, do women vote that much differently than men?
EW: For the first fifty years, they voted very similarly to men. The suffragists had both promised and threatened an organized women’s vote that would reward its friends and punish its opponents. That never really developed.
When politicians realized that women were not voting as a bloc, not punishing those who had been against suffrage or the Nineteenth Amendment, they began to ignore them. And so what you do see is that participation of women does not equal that of men until around 1960. Then by 1980, which is the first time we’re measuring this in a more modern way, we see women’s participation surpassing that of men. That’s been growing ever since.
DR: Let’s go back to our country at the beginning. When there were just thirteen colonies, did any let women vote?
EW: New Jersey did allow women to vote when it became one of the original thirteen states. What’s so interesting about that is that women in New Jersey did vote from about 1789 until 1807, when the powers that be realized that they were voting out some of the rascals and voting in some reform candidates. Politicians didn’t like it, so they changed the state constitution, and New Jersey women lost the right to vote.
Sometimes a school board in certain districts allowed women to vote on school matters. That was the domestic domain of women, so it was considered okay. But for the most part it was prohibited by state constitutions.
DR: Did England allow women to vote before that happened in the United States or not?
EW: It was a little bit before. The U.S. and U.K. suffrage movements were very much sister movements. They moved in parallel. There was a lot of communication between the leaders. Some of the leaders actually joined together and formed an International Woman Suffrage Alliance. This was not just an American idea, it was a concept that was spreading around the world.
Great Britain did give women the right to vote in early 1918, while World War I is still raging. But it did not give all women the right to vote—only women who had property and paid taxes and were over thirty years old.
I was really puzzled by the thirty-years-old requirement. Then I read an account that this age requirement was put in because Great Britain had lost more than a million men in World War I, and they felt if they allowed all women over twenty-one to vote, there’d be an imbalance. There’d be too many women voting. So it’s not for another decade—1928—that all British women over the age of twenty-one get the right to vote.
DR: The beginning of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States is often thought to be the Seneca Falls conference in 1848. No disrespect to Seneca Falls, but it’s not a major city. Why didn’t they have this in Boston or New York or Philadelphia?
EW: There’s a really simple answer to that. It’s because Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived in Seneca Falls. Now, women’s rights was something that had been talked about for decades. It didn’t just pop up at Seneca Falls. But this was the first publicly announced conference dedicated to the idea of women’s rights.
DR: The suffragists would say, “Why don’t we use the Fourteenth Amendment as a justification? Let’s go to the voting booths and vote.” Then they would take it to the courts and see if the Supreme Court would uphold it. What happened to that effort?
EW: The suffragists used many different strategies and methods. One of them was to use the courts to try to get women’s rights acknowledged.
It launches in the 1870s after American women are left out of the Fifteenth Amendment, which only covers the newly freed Black men. The suffragists decide to conduct civil disobedience. Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth and more than two hundred other women in several elections in the 1870s, but specifically the 1872 presidential election, go to the polls and demand to be registered and to vote. They’re trying to test the law that under the Fourteenth Amendment, as citizens of the nation, they already possess the right to vote and they just have to exercise it.
Susan Anthony gathers her sisters and some friends in Rochester, New York, where she lives, and they march down to the polling place and they vote. The authorities come after Anthony as the face of the movement, and they arrest her. She is charged with illegal voting in a federal election. She brings her case to the public and says, “Is it a crime for a U.S. citizen to vote?”
And of course she is convicted. She refuses to pay the fine. She wants to bring this to the Supreme Court. She wants to go to prison. The judge does not allow it. He doesn’t want a martyr in prison. So she never pays that fine, but other people do bring a case to the Supreme Court.
It’s decided by the Supreme Court in 1874 that women are citizens but they are nonvoting citizens. At that point the suffragists realize they’re going to have to do something different, and they draft an amendment to the Constitution.
DR: As I understand it, there were two strategies. Strategy one is “Let’s try to get a constitutional amendment.” That would solve everything. But there was also an effort to go state by state and get a state legislature to approve the right for women to vote in that particular state. Why did the effort to get a constitutional amendment prevail and the effort to get the vote approved in each state not prevail?
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