Such victories reinvigorated the movement, as did other tangible signs of progress. In 1910, President William H. Taft agreed to address the annual convention of NAWSA, endorsing the cause in remarkably opaque and ambivalent prose.
In the first place popular representative government we approve and support because on the whole every class, that is, every set of individuals who are similarly situated in the community, who are intelligent enough to know what their own interests are, are better qualified to determine how those interests shall be cared for and preserved than any other class, however altruistic that class may be; but I call your attention to two qualifications in that statement. One is that the class should be intelligent enough to know its own interests. The theory that Hottentots or any other uneducated, altogether unintelligent class is fitted for self-government at once or to take part in government is a theory that I wholly dissent from—but this qualification is not applicable here. The other qualification to which I call your attention is that the class should as a whole care enough to look after its interests, to take part as a whole in the exercise of political power if it is conferred. Now if it does not care enough for this, then it seems to me that the danger is, if the power is conferred, that it may be exercised by that part of the class least desirable as political constituents and be neglected by many of those who are intelligent and patriotic and would be most desirable as members of the electorate.
Taft’s reference to Hottentots infuriated many suffragists, but what mattered politically was that he spoke at all. That same year, a petition favoring a federal amendment, signed by more than 400,000 women, was presented to Congress. In 1912, the Progressive Party endorsed women’s right to vote, and in March 1913, Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration was partially eclipsed by a suffrage parade of 5,000 women in Washington. The following year, a Senate committee reported favorably on a federal amendment, and for the first time in decades a draft amendment was brought to the floor of Congress for a vote. Throughout these years, the issue garnered far more attention in the press than ever before, while suffragists ratcheted up the pressure to change both state and federal laws.62
Nonetheless, opposition remained strong, particularly in the eastern half of the country. Although the movement was sturdy enough to compel numerous states to hold referenda on women’s suffrage, defeats were far more common than victories. In 1912, referenda had negative outcomes in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan (where the result was repeated in 1913); in 1914, the men of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, and Ohio (again) voted similarly; the following year, suffrage proposals were defeated by large margins in the industrial states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. In nearly all of these states, political machines (generally Democratic but Republican in Pennsylvania), liquor interests, elite opponents of democratization, and immigrant groups (particularly Germans, but some of the Irish as well) contributed to the defeats. So too did the durability of traditional beliefs that could not be reconciled with the enfranchisement of women.63
The strength and persistence of such beliefs ought not be underestimated, however tempting it may be to regard them as mere window dressing for more material, political, or ethnic interests. At the 1912 Ohio Constitutional Convention, for example, the standard array of prosuffrage arguments (including numerous invocations of the needs of female workers and the positive stance of the labor movement) repeatedly was countered by a profoundly different social vision, grounded in religion, culture, and individual life experiences. One delegate, after extensively quoting the Bible, including the phrase from Corinthians that “the head of every woman is the man,” insisted that enfranchisement would “blot out three of the most sacred words known in the world’s vocabulary of six thousand years, namely, mother, home, and heaven.” Another spoke reverentially of his mother, a widow “who took in long rolls of wool to spin for her neighbors” and who never voted. Several lamented that voting was a “burden” that they ought not place on the “shoulders” of women and that only “unwomenly” women would vote; another characterized the agitation for suffrage as “a sex war.” One eloquent opponent announced with a telling sense of social and generational resentment, It was testimony to the growth of prosuffrage sentiment that the Ohio convention voted to hold a referendum on the issue: numerous delegates announced that they personally opposed suffrage but did not want to bear the responsibility of preventing its passage. But the traditional gender ideology that they voiced was sufficiently widespread that the referendum failed in 1912 and again in 1914.64
I stand here as the apostle of the old man—mere man—tyrannical man. The old fellow who brings home the rent—who eats out of a kettle at noon, and fills it with kindling to carry home in the evening. The old fellow who pays for the food and heat and light, who puts up the insurance premiums, and occasionally wrestles with a chattel mortgage . . . the old fellow who has hewn the wood and drawn the water, who has tunnelled our mountains, who has bridged our rivers, who has built our railroads . . . and who now stands in the presence of it all wearing plain clothes, holding up horny hands, weary in body and mind, quietly receiving the assurance that he is indeed a tyrant.
Although no referenda were held in the South during this period, the suffrage movement there also gained strength. A new surge of organizing began in 1910, rooted in an urban and quasi-urban middle class that had grown rapidly in preceding decades: that middle class spawned southern “New Women” who were educated, had held professional or white-collar service jobs, and were married to (or the children of) professionals and small businessmen. This new generation of white southern suffragists—women such as Gertrude Weil from the railroad juncture town of Goldsboro, North Carolina, or Margaret Caldwell of Nashville, the daughter of a doctor and wife of a car dealer—was motivated by concerns very similar to those of their northern counterparts, and they joined hands with NAWSA and other national organizations, reviving or building chapters throughout the South. By 1913, every southern state had a suffrage organization allied with NAWSA; within a few years, Virginia’s organization had 13,000 members and Alabama possessed eighty-one local suffrage clubs. These women were joined (although usually not in the same organizations) by numerous African-American women who believed with good reason that they, more than anyone perhaps, had a compelling need to be enfranchised. Notably, some southern suffragists, like their northern colleagues, made concerted efforts to reach out to the South’s emerging labor movement and to link the cause of suffrage to the exploitation of working people. “We have no right,” declared Virginia’s Lucy Randolph Mason, “to stand idly by and profit by the underpaid and overdriven labor of people bound with the chains of economic bondage.”65
Despite such efforts, the soil for democratic expansion remained less fertile in the South. Not only was the middle class relatively small and the rural world large and difficult to reach, but antisuffrage forces were strong and well organized. In addition to the liquor interests and political machines, such as those in New Orleans and parts of Texas, suffragists had to contend with active and well-financed antisuffrage organizations, led by upper-class women and men tied both to the world of plantation agriculture and to the new industrial South of textiles and railroads. This elite opposition was grounded in southern variants of traditional gender ideology and in a fierce class-based antagonism to the types of social reform (including labor reform) that many suffragists advocated.66
The opposition also had a great deal to do with race. By the latter years of the Progressive era, African Americans had been successfully disfranchised throughout the South, and most whites were intent on keeping it that way. Politicians were loath to tinker at all with electoral laws, and they feared that black women might prove to be more difficult to keep from the polls than black men—because black women were believed to be more literate than men and more aggressive about asserting their rights, and also because women would be unseemly targets of repressive violence. “We are not afraid to maul a black man over the h
ead if he dares to vote, but we can’t treat women, even black women, that way,” fretted a senator from Mississippi. Although some white suffragists continued to advance the statistical argument that woman suffrage would insure white supremacy, that rhetorical claim made no more headway after 1910 than it had in the 1890s.67
Faced with this opposition, in a one-party political system that left little room for dissent, suffragists found it difficult to make much progress. In 1912, after a perfunctory debate, the Virginia legislature voted eighty-eight to twelve against a state amendment; the state senate declined to vote on the issue at all. In Louisiana, both branches of the legislature rejected a bill that would have permitted white women to vote in Democratic primaries, and the electorate then rebuffed a proposal for school suffrage. Although the Arkansas legislature did approve a suffrage referendum (that was not submitted to the people because of a technicality), as did the lower house in Alabama, most state governments declined to promote referenda on the issue and some reacted derisively to suffrage proposals. In 1916, for example, the state senate of Georgia set a hearing on women’s suffrage for the day after the legislature adjourned.68
Compounding the difficulties faced by southern suffragists was another issue, the growing support nationally for a federal amendment. If women’s suffrage itself was unpopular in much of the South, a federal constitutional amendment was anathema. Not implausibly, many Southerners were convinced that a federal amendment would open the doors to Washington’s intervention in elections, to enforcement—so glaringly absent—of the Fifteenth Amendment and any subsequent amendment that might appear to guarantee the voting rights of black women. In addition to strengthening antisuffragism, this issue split the southern suffrage movement itself, often along lines coinciding with suffragists’ attitudes toward racial equality. While some suffragists welcomed the prospect of a federal strategy (either on principle or because it was more likely to succeed than state efforts), others—most vocally, Kate Gordon of Louisiana—denounced the possibility. Gordon, a champion of women’s suffrage as a bulwark against black political power, resigned her leadership position in NAWSA to protest the organization’s renewed efforts to promote a federal amendment. In 1913, she founded the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference to focus on passage of state laws and on convincing the national Democratic Party to endorse suffrage on a state-by-state basis. Gordon’s new organization—which she thought should replace NAWSA’s in the South—proved to be short-lived, but by 1915 it was evident that the two currents in the southern movement coexisted very uneasily with one another.69
The Nineteenth Amendment
To fail to ask for the suffrage amendment at this time would be treason to the fundamental cause for which we, as a nation, have entered the war. President Wilson has declared that “we are at war because of that which is dearest to our hearts—democracy; that those who submit to authority shall have a voice in the Government.” If this is the basic reason for entering the war, then for those of us who have striven for this amendment and for our freedom and for democracy to yield today, to withdraw from the battle, would be to desert the men in the trenches and leave them to fight alone across the sea not only for democracy for the world but also for our own country.
—ANNA HOWARD SHAW, HEARING BEFORE THE HOUSE COMMITTEE
ON WOMAN SUFFRAGE, 1918
In 1914 and 1915, the suffrage movement stood at a crossroads. Although women were fully enfranchised in some states and had partial suffrage in many, the movement for political equality still faced an uphill, obstacle-laden struggle. Victories had been won, but defeats were more numerous, and none of the heavily populated states of the Northeast and Midwest had granted women the right to vote. The social base of the movement was broader than ever, but key segments of the electorate remained antagonistic, most politicians were waffling, and the opposition was better organized.
Not surprisingly, the mixed record of wins and losses—coming after fifty years of effort—spawned a vigorous strategic debate. Some NAWSA activists favored a continuation of efforts to alter state constitutions: this strategy had yielded victories, and it had the virtue of deflecting the opposition of states’ rights advocates, particularly (but not exclusively) in the South. Proponents of a state strategy also were mindful that Congress had defeated a proposed federal amendment in 1914 and early 1915. On the other hand, state campaigns required a massive investment of resources, and they seemed almost unwinnable both in the South and in other states (such as Minnesota and New Mexico) whose constitutions could be amended only through elaborate, multilayered electoral procedures. Passage of a federal amendment, in contrast, would demand only congressional approval (by a two-thirds vote) followed by votes in the legislatures of three-quarters of the states. It was for these tactical reasons—in addition to the principle that all of the nation’s female citizens should be enfranchised—that Alice Paul and her friend Lucy Burns (also a veteran of the militant wing of the British movement) split off from NAWSA to create the Congressional Union, which would focus single-mindedly on a federal amendment.70
In 1915, with the reelection of Carrie Chapman Catt as its president, NAWSA too began to tilt decisively toward a federal strategy. The text of the Nineteenth Amendment, still modeled on the Fifteenth, was simple and straightforward:Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.
Section 2. Congress shall have power, by appropriate legislation, to enforce the provisions of this article.
Catt devised a “Winning Plan” of building support in the thirty-six states most likely to ratify an amendment; under her leadership, NAWSA also managed to increase its membership from one hundred thousand to two million by 1917. Meanwhile, the Congressional Union intensified its efforts, and as a cadre organization, smaller and more focused than the sprawling heterogeneous NAWSA, became increasingly militant in its tactics. Although not by design, the combination of the Congressional Union’s militance and NAWSA’s more moderate yet insistent lobbying was emerging as a potent strategic force, a political pincers’ movement that kept the public spotlight and political pressure on both parties.71
In 1916, the Congressional Union and NAWSA catapulted the issue of women’s suffrage, for the first time, into the mainstream of national party politics. The partisan lineup on the issue was—as it long had been—complex and fluid. Support for women’s suffrage was most common among reform-minded Republicans, but the party itself was not united, either nationally or in most states. Vehement opposition came both from Tory Republicans, who wished to turn the clock back on democratization, and from those who resisted social reform, such as New York’s Senator James Wadsworth. Another stalwart Republican opponent was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the author of the 1890 “force” bill to guarantee black voting rights in the South. The Democratic Party was also divided: its southern wing and urban machines generally had opposed women’s suffrage, and the party’s embrace of states’ rights mitigated against a federal amendment. Yet there were many prosuffrage Democratic politicians, including Champ Clark of Missouri, the powerful Speaker of the House from 1911 to 1919.72
Breaking with the suffrage movement’s tradition of nonpartisanship, the Congressional Union—and its organizational offspring, the Woman’s Party and the National Woman’s Party—attempted in 1914 and again in 1916 to mobilize women who were already enfranchised to vote against Democratic candidates. Despite that threat, President Woodrow Wilson declined to endorse women’s suffrage, evasively reiterating his view that suffrage was a state issue; the national Democratic Party was similarly unresponsive. (The Republican platform of 1916, in contrast, endorsed the cause, albeit in watered-down language.) When the votes were counted, the suffragists’ strategy appeared to have failed: Wilson was reelected, the Democrats won most states where women had voted, and there was no evidence that Democratic congressional candidates had suffered because of their party’s stance on the voting rig
hts of women.73
Nonetheless, the 1916 elections set in motion two distinctive partisan dynamics that had surfaced periodically in suffrage struggles since the 1840s. The first resulted from the partial enfranchisement of women: some women already could vote in all elections, and many could vote in some elections. As Alice Paul and her allies realized, such circumstances gave women leverage to reward or punish politicians because of their (or their party’s) stance on the Nineteenth Amendment. That this leverage was not particularly effective in 1916 did not mean that it would remain inconsequential: Democrats in states such as California, where women did vote, still had good reason to press the national party to endorse women’s suffrage. The second dynamic was that of the “endgame,” the dynamic of possible or impending victory: once it seemed likely or even possible that women’s suffrage eventually would be achieved, either nationally or in an individual state, the potential political cost of a vote against enfranchisement rose dramatically. Such a vote all too easily could earn the enmity of a large group of future constituents. The invariable upshot of such circumstances (and a clear sign that a suffrage contest had entered its endgame) was pressure on political leaders to jump on the bandwagon, or at the very least, to get out of the road.
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