by Gail Collins
By the turn of the century, the two great suffrage warriors were resigned to the idea that they would not live to see women vote nationwide. “Logically, our enfranchisement ought to have occurred…in Reconstruction days,” said Elizabeth Cady Stanton at eighty-six, shortly before her death in 1902. “Our movement is belated, and like all things too long postponed, now gets on everybody’s nerves.” The cause of woman suffrage had become respectable by then, but the energy had gone out of the fight. The movement had hit a period that suffrage leaders came to call “the doldrums.” Women had given up hope that Congress would approve an amendment to the Constitution, and under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, suffrage organizers embarked on a campaign to amend every single state constitution instead. It was a dispiriting business, short on excitement and long on circulating petitions and lobbying uninspiring state legislators. All the horrors of the state-by-state strategy were epitomized by South Dakota, with its summer heat, winter cold, remote towns, thin population, and unreliable political allies. The suffragists staged five different full-bore campaigns to change South Dakota’s state constitution and win the vote for its scattered female residents. During one of these efforts, Catt got typhoid and nearly died. After Anthony, then seventy, returned home from a summer of South Dakota campaigning, her sister Mary remarked that for the first time she realized Susan was growing old.
“To get the word ‘male’ in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign,” said Carrie Chapman Catt when it was all over. “During that time they were forced to conduct 56 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 campaigns to include woman suffrage planks in party platforms and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.”
On the surface it was hard to understand why politicians were so resistant. True, they still got up and made speeches about the importance of keeping women safe at home. But in reality, most women worked, at least until they married, and when the nation entered World War I, some of them took the place of men in steel foundries, munitions factories, and behind the wheels of tractors and trains. Many states whose legislators opposed national suffrage allowed women to vote in certain elections—school board contests in some states, presidential elections in others. The real opposition was pragmatic. Democrats suspected that women would vote Republican. Urban machine politicians distrusted women voters because they connected them with reform movements. Much of the money to run anti-suffrage campaigns came from the liquor industry, which realized it would be out of business if women got to vote on Prohibition. Perhaps most important of all was the solid resistance from southern politicians. By the end of the nineteenth century they had successfully deprived black men of the right to vote, and the last thing they wanted was pressure to open the door for black women.
It was all very well for Anthony and Stanton to resign themselves to dying before the vote arrived. But it must have been depressing for suffragists when Carrie Catt, who was forty-one years old when she succeeded Anthony as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, indicated she didn’t expect to get it in her lifetime, either. In 1912, Catt wrote to a friend that she was sure a woman would eventually rise up and lead the suffrage movement to victory. “Some day she’ll come. Perhaps she is growing up now…” she wrote. While Anthony had assured women that failure was impossible, Catt in her gloomier moods sometimes gave the impression victory wasn’t all that likely, either.
A former school superintendent who had worked her way through college, Carrie Catt was totally dedicated to the suffrage cause. Before her marriage, she and her future husband, a wealthy engineer, signed a legal contract which provided that Carrie would have two months off in the spring and two months off in the fall to work for women’s right to vote. But some people felt she was too cautious and eager to compromise. Harriot Stanton Blatch, returning to the United States after twenty years in England with her British husband, found the women’s movement her mother had started depressing beyond words, and far too identified with the needs of well-to-do clubwomen. “The only method suggested for furthering the cause was the slow process of education,” she said. “We were told to organize, organize, organize, to the end of educating, educating, educating.”
Blatch wanted to be daring. (When some of the old guard protested her tactics might subject them to ridicule, Blatch, who was definitely her mother’s daughter, said: “Ridicule, ridicule. Blessed be ridicule.”) She and her friends wanted to bring working women into the movement and encourage them to take a leading public role. They also wanted fun, excitement, and parades. After yellow was adopted as the official suffrage hue, no parade was complete without many variations on the theme of gold—in Louisville, twelve little girls decked out as yellow butterflies led a train of floats and automobiles. In 1912, a parade for women’s right to vote in Manhattan attracted 10,000 marchers in a display “the like of which New York never knew before,” said the Times. It was not just the size of the event that caught the nation’s notice, but the way it cut across class lines. Corset makers, nurses, social workers, schoolgirls, writers, society women, laundresses, and teachers walked arm in arm. The wealthy trendsetter Alva Belmont marched with the factory workers. The dressmakers carried a banner showing a sewing machine, and the writers had pictures of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
In California in 1911, western women used the same upbeat tactics in a second try at changing their state constitution. The movement swung into action with all the parades, pageants, plays, and billboards it could muster. Volunteers distributed lapel buttons and suffrage baggage stickers and draped everything in sight in yellow. The advertising industry, never shy about glomming on to a trend with pizzazz, invented a “Suffragette Cracker” and ran “Votes for Women” headlines over the most unlikely copy. In one, a woman appeared to be dropping a cereal biscuit in the ballot box as the ad argued that Shredded Wheat was “a vote for health, happiness and domestic freedom.” Despite the liquor industry’s best effort to pack the ballot boxes, the women won. The margin was a minscule 3+87 votes, but to the suffrage movement, it was more than enough. Martha Farnsworth, a Kansas housewife, was at a meeting of the Topeka Good Government Club when word came that California had given its women the right to vote. “We all shouted for joy, some hugged and kissed one another, some cried and some jumped up and down for joy and joined most heartily in singing ‘Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.’ O, we were a happy lot,” she wrote in her diary.
Western states, however, had always been more open to women’s rights and women’s votes than the rest of the country. Except for the South, the Northeast, where the suffrage movement was born, turned out to be the most resistant, due to the opposition of urban machine bosses, the liquor industry, and a distinct lack of enthusiasm in the Catholic Church. In 1915, Carrie Chapman Catt led a mammoth effort to win the vote in New York that featured, by her count, 10,300 meetings, 7.5 million leaflets (“or three and a half for every voter”), and a parade of 20,000 people in New York City. But the women lost. “Men too drunk to sign their own name voted all over the state,” Catt said later. Nevertheless, everyone was impressed by her organizational drive—not to mention her way with statistics. She was also a newly minted heiress. Mrs. Frank Leslie, a magazine editor, died in 1914 and left the bulk of her estate to Catt for use in the suffrage effort. After the relatives finished contesting the will, it still amounted to more than a million dollars.
“THERE IS NO ALICE PAUL. THERE IS SUFFRAGE.”
Even with their parades and yellow bunting, American women were far more conservative in their tactics than the suffragists in England, who were willing to smash windows, throw rocks, and get arrested. (In the most spectacular act of British militancy,
Emily Davison threw herself in front of the king’s horse during the running of the English Derby in 1913, achieving instant if gruesome martyrdom for the cause.) Alice Paul, the last great leader of the American movement, spent her political apprenticeship with the English suffragists. Then, like Harriot Blatch, she moved back home and dedicated her life to the cause. When Paul dedicated herself, she went all the way. Although she was a voracious reader who eventually earned three law degrees, for a long time she refused to read anything except tomes on suffrage, lest her attention be diverted. She was another one of those charismatic female leaders who was both powerfully assertive and tantalizingly remote. (A magazine writer, assigned to produce a profile on the “real” Paul, concluded in despair: “There is no Alice Paul. There is suffrage.”) Paul seemed uninterested in things as mundane as food and refused to spend more than 30 cents a day on meals. Always small and frail-looking, she was so single-minded that one of her political opponents was convinced her lack of nutrition had drained her sanity, calling her an “anemic fanatic.”
Paul hated the state-by-state strategy. She believed women would never win the right to vote without a constitutional amendment, but there was no sign Congress was prepared to pass one. Woodrow Wilson, when asked his opinion on suffrage during the presidential campaign of 1912, dodged grandly: “Ladies, this is a very arguable question and my mind is in the middle of the argument.” On the day before his inauguration in 1913, Paul made her national debut with a great suffrage parade in Washington, featuring 8,000 marchers, 26 floats, 10 bands, and 6 chariots. Inez Milholland, the beautiful horsewoman who assured young American womanhood that fighting for suffrage provided good exercise, led the marchers astride a white steed. Over a half million people gathered to watch them, and when the president-elect arrived by train that morning, he was disconcerted to find no crowds assembled to greet him.
In his youth, Woodrow Wilson had once called woman suffrage “the foundation of every evil in this country.” He supported the idea that each state should decide the issue for itself—the stance that the South was also pushing, because it would allow southern states to keep the franchise as limited and as white as possible. Alice Paul became one of the banes of his life, but her intransigence began pushing him closer to Carrie Catt and the mainstream suffragists. Wilson had always needed admiring women in his life—while the nation was under the impression he was deep in mourning for his recently deceased wife, the lonely president was already courting a successor. Women like Catt were exactly the kind he found most sympathetic—well-to-do, well educated, and respectful of authority. Catt and her friends seemed to understand his problems and find Alice Paul as trying as he did. He and the second Mrs. Wilson appeared at the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association during his reelection campaign in 1916, and Wilson hinted as broadly as possible that he was coming around: “We feel the tide; we rejoice in the strength of it and we shall not quarrel in the long run as to the method of it.” The next speaker, in response, said: “We have waited so long, Mr. President, for the vote—we had hoped it might come in your administration.” Spontaneously, the entire audience stood and silently turned to face their guest of honor. The president, Catt felt certain, was in their corner.
After Wilson’s reelection, Alice Paul and her supporters decided to picket the White House. The demonstrations went on for eighteen months and when America entered World War I, Paul resisted other leaders’ urging that she abandon the protests until hostilities were over. Instead, the picketers carried banners asking how the country could fight for democracy abroad when women did not enjoy it at home. They were harassed by passersby, and after one rough day of demonstrating, Paul was warned that the women would be arrested if they ever returned to the White House.
“I feel that we will continue,” she told the chief of police.
Arrests followed—first perfunctory trips to the police station, then fines, which the protesters refused to pay, and finally increasingly severe prison sentences. Suffragists were shot at and dragged down the street by people attempting to wrest away their banners. They received longer and longer sentences to Occoquam prison, where the cells were small, dank, and heavily populated with rodents and the food was full of worms. In October 1918, Alice Paul, serving a six-month sentence, began a hunger strike to protest the prison conditions. Rose Winslow, a Polish immigrant who fasted along with Paul, smuggled out messages to her husband and friends, reporting that they were being force-fed by prison officials, who poured food into their stomachs via a tube stuck down their throats. “Yesterday was a bad day for me in feeding,” she wrote. “I was vomiting continually during the process. The tube has developed an irritation somewhere that is painful…. Don’t let them tell you we take this well. Miss Paul vomits much…we think of the coming feeding all day. It is horrible.” As women were released, they toured the country dressed in prison garb, to publicize their comrades’ plight. Democrats began to worry they would suffer reprisals in the November elections.
Finally, Wilson threw himself behind the drive to win women the vote. With heavy lobbying from the president, the House took up the Susan B. Anthony amendment: “The rights 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.” It was a moment some men, as well as women, had been waiting for. One congressman, who had been in the hospital for six months, staggered into the House to cast his vote for suffrage. Representative Thetus Sims of Tennessee, who had broken his arm and shoulder, refused to have it set for fear of missing the vote. Another supporter had himself carried in on a stretcher. Frederick Hicks of New York, who had been home at the bedside of his dying wife, left at her urging and went to Washington to vote for suffrage. The amendment passed by exactly the two-thirds vote necessary and Representative Hicks returned home for his wife’s funeral.
The president then took the extraordinary step of going to the Capitol to personally plead with the Senate and remind them that disenfranchised women were at that very moment nursing soldiers overseas and filling in for absent men on the home front. “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?” he asked. The Senate was unmoved. The vote was 62–34, two votes short of the two-thirds majority needed. It took more than another year to get the Anthony amendment completely through Congress. Meanwhile, a number of states had approved suffrage on their own, including New York and South Dakota, on the fifth try. Catt wryly said she presumed South Dakota voters “had accumulated some education on the subject” by then.
Congressional approval, so long coming, was only the first step. The suffragists still had to get the amendment ratified by thirty-six states, and by late summer 1920, the drive seemed stuck, just one state short of success. Everyone converged on Tennessee, where the legislature was so divided and so heavily lobbied it was impossible to tell what would happen. Lawmakers were alternately threatened and plied with liquor, and by the night before the Senate vote, Carrie Catt reported that “both suffrage and anti-suffrage men were reeling through the hall in an advanced state of intoxication.” The Senate voted 25–4 for the amendment. Catt, watching a lifetime of work hang in the balance, must have wondered if that girl she envisioned growing up to lead the suffrage movement to victory was going to turn out to be herself after all. “We are up to the last half of the last state,” she wrote.
The struggle for women’s right to vote had been filled with high drama and cliffhanger votes from the beginning, and it would have been a shame if the last moments were not equally exciting. The Tennessee House didn’t let history down. The Speaker, who had been a suffrage supporter, suddenly changed his mind and ratification seemed to be one vote short. Then Harry Burns, at age twenty-four the youngest state legislator and a presumed opponent, rose to say he had received a letter from his mother, telling him: “Hurrah and vote for suffrage. Don’t keep them in
doubt…. I have been watching how you stood but have not seen anything yet. Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt.” Burns voted yes. “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for a boy to follow,” he said.
In November 1920, Charlotte Woodward, who had driven as a teenage girl to the famous gathering at Seneca Falls, cast her first vote for president of the United States. She was the only person who had been there at the beginning and lived to see the end.
“BELIEVE…AT LEAST FOR THE TIME BEING,
IN THE SYMPATHY OF WOMEN”
In 1913, when Alice Paul decided to steal the thunder from Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration with her great parade, Ida Wells-Barnett, the black journalist and activist, arrived in Washington with a sixty-member delegation of African American women from her Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. Paul was not thrilled to see them. In an effort to placate southern suffragists, she had announced that there would be no black women in the march. But African Americans were determined this historic moment was not going to be an all-white affair. “If the Illinois women do not take a stand now in this great democratic parade then the colored women are lost,” said Wells-Barnett. In the end, Paul reluctantly allowed the black women to walk at the end of the procession. Only Wells-Barnett broke ranks. She vanished into the crowd and then stepped back onto the street as the Illinois delegation passed, joining her white friends for the rest of the march.
This sort of thing happened to black suffragists all the time. Whenever there was a question of choosing between the sensibilities of racist southerners and the feelings of African American women, they wound up on the outside—or the back of the parade. When the suffrage movement held its first big convention in the South in 1894 in Atlanta, Susan B. Anthony asked Frederick Douglass to stay away out of “expediency.” When the convention met in New Orleans in 1903, black women were barred from attending. Anthony paid a visit to one of the largest black women’s clubs in the city in an effort to make amends. The president, Sylvanie Williams, greeted her politely, then said pointedly: “When women like you, Miss Anthony, come to see us and speak to us, it helps us to believe in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man, and at least for the time being, in the sympathy of women.”