As the 1910s wore one, the slow trickle of support for women’s suffrage at the state level that had characterized the years of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States gradually took on the aspect of something more like a deluge. In Arizona in 1912 – the same year that the Copper State joined the union – decades of organization and lobbying efforts by first the NWSA and then the NAWSA finally paid off in the form of a ballot initiative seeking to embed women’s suffrage in the state’s newly-minted constitution. Initially, NAWSA activists, led by Laura Gregg Cannon (1869-1945), attempted to convince the assembled delegates at the Arizona Constitutional Convention in October of 1910 to include female suffrage in the prospective state’s foundational charter, but this effort was ultimately shot down by convention president George W. P. Hunt (1859-1934) for fear that Congress would refuse to admit any state that allowed women to vote. Two years later, however, with statehood having been achieved and Hunt now serving in the office of governor, the time seemed ripe for another pro-suffrage campaign. A first attempt to make use of the regular legislative process failed – if only just – for lack of institutional support. But the next effort, led by longtime activist and Arizona resident Frances Munds (1866-1948), resulted in a successful drive for signatures over the scorching summer of 1912 and the placement of a suffrage referendum on the ballot that coming November. The NAWSA sent personnel and funds to help with the resulting publicity work, which included speeches, rallies, leaflets, buttons, and endorsements on the part of local labor unions and presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919). And the final result, on November 5th, was a victory for the supporters of women’s suffrage, 13,442 to 6,202.
That same year in Kansas – site of the
AERA’s disastrous lobbying campaign of 1867 – the third attempt by local and
out-of-state activists to see the Sunflower State grant women the right to vote
was also met with success. Though a statewide referendum to that effect had
just been held and defeated as recently as 1894, 1912 nevertheless witnessed
another tremendous rallying of energy and resources, culminating ultimately in
a pro-suffrage resolution being introduced by state judge Granville Pearl
Aikman (1858-1923) during the Republican State Convention, the resulting
affirmation by the assembled delegates of that resolution, and the consequent
formation of an alliance between pro-suffrage activists and the state’s
dominant political party. The following year, in the far-flung Alaska Territory
– formed out of the unorganized Alaska District only in August of 1912 – the
efforts of the local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to
advocate for women’s suffrage as an aid to the banning of liquor sales likewise
resulted in a victory for the cause of reform. Led in large part by local
social crusader Cornelia Templeton Hatcher (1867-1953), Alaskan women drew up
petitions and solicited signatures, lobbied and gained the support of the
Western Federation of Miners and the Daily Alaska Dispatch, and
succeeded in placing the suffrage issue at the top of the territorial
legislature’s agenda at its first ever meeting in January of 1913. Pursuant to
a few rounds of voting and the signature of the territorial governor, a bill
enfranchising Alaskan women accordingly became law on March 21st,
1913.
The wave of change continued into 1914,
with Nevada and Montana both granting women the right to vote that year. In the
former state, building upon decades of work by the likes of Laura de Force
Gordon (1838-1907) and Emily Pitts Stevens (1844-1906), the Non-Partisan Equal
Suffrage League and the NAWSA, the Nevada Equal Franchise Society – formed in
1911 – distributed tens of thousands of pro-suffrage pamphlets, solicited the
support of labor unions and local political organizations, and in 1913 secured
the placement of a female suffrage referendum on the electoral calendar for the
following November. In the leadup to the resulting vote, NEFS president Anne
Henrietta Martin (1875-1951) engaged in a marathon cross-state lobbying tour,
travelling three thousand miles to visit ranchers and silver miners for the
purpose of taking their political temperature and persuading them to support
women’s suffrage. These efforts – which apparently enamored Martin to many of
the state’s hard-scrabble inhabitants – along with assistance and funding
provided by the NAWSA, culminated in a victory on November 3rd by a
margin of 10,936 to 7,257. At that same time – indeed, on the same day – the
voters of Montana likewise backed a constitutional amendment enacting women’s
suffrage. In the case of the Treasure State, much of the relevant effort was
undertaken by Jeanette Rankin (1880-1973) and Maggie Smith Hathaway (1867-1955),
both of whom later become among that selfsame jurisdiction’s first female
public officials. Rankin, in her capacity as president of the Montana Women’s
Suffrage Association and national field secretary of the NAWSA, gave speeches
before the state legislature – the first ever woman to do so – organized a
pro-suffrage presentation for the 1914 Montana State Fair, led a massive
pro-suffrage parade through downtown Helena, and ensured that the relevant
ballots, once cast, were counted under the supervision of NAWSA-back lawyers.
Hathaway, meanwhile, undertook a whirlwind tour of the state in an effort to
drum up grassroots support, besting Anne Martin’s total distance tally by over
fifteen hundred miles. Ultimately, when the votes were tallied, women’s
suffrage once again triumphed by a margin of 41,302 to 37,588.
By 1917, with the United States having just
entered WWI, a great deal had changed for the cause of women’s suffrage since
the beginning of the century. In 1900, only four states – Wyoming, Utah,
Colorado, and Idaho – recognized the right of women citizens to vote. Seventeen
years later, that number had more than doubled to ten states – with the
additions of Washington, California, Kansas, Arizona, Nevada, and Montana – and
one territory – Alaska – while in the intervening years a number of significant
firsts had taken place. On August 27th, 1908, the first suffrage
march in the history of the United States was held in Oakland California. In
1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party became the first national party in
American history to endorse women’s suffrage as part of its official platform.
In 1913, former NAWSA activist and leader of the breakaway Congressional Union
for Woman Suffrage Alice Paul (1885-1977) organized the Woman Suffrage
Procession in Washington D.C. to coincide with the inauguration of President
Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), resulting in between five thousand and ten thousand
women proceeding down Pennsylvania Avenue on March 3rd amidst local
opposition and famously lackluster police protection. And in 1916, Jeanette
Rankin was elected by the people of Montana as the nation’s first female member
of the House of Representatives. In spite of all of this pro-suffrage activity,
however, the prospects for a federal constitutional amendment remained markedly
dim. The proposal first introduced in 1879 by California Senator Augustus A.
Sargent was still a going concerned – having been reintroduced at some point
during every subsequent session of Congress – but hardly anyone was inclined to
take it seriously any longer. The women’s rights movement had thus far been
making its most significant strides in the states, and doubtless many observers
had come to assume that this was the only viable path forward. As is so often
the case, however, the pressures of war as felt on the homefront would soon
change what seemed possible.
The most immediate shift – and doubtless
the most visible as well – was the necessary entry of American women into new
realms of public life. With many thousands of men being mobilized to fight on
the battlefronts of Western Europe, a domestic labor shortage was in the offing
unless as many women stepped up to take their place in vital industries. In
consequence – and backed by federal recruitment drives – American women were
subsequently hired in unprecedented numbers to work in munitions factories and
vehicle plants and even began replacing absent men as municipal transportation
conductors, postal workers, police officers, firefighters, and office clerks.
And at the same time, in keeping with the needs of the war effort directly,
women volunteered in droves for public service positions as ambulance drivers,
nurses, and relief workers. From the perspective of the NAWSA, these
developments represented an unexpected boon. Under the continued leadership of
Carrie Chapman Catt, the organization not only decided to formally support the
American war effort – a position which did not sit well with its members who
were pacifists – but it held up the resulting explosion of female employment as
validation of its stated position. Clearly, Catt took to asserting, regardless
of what any of the opponents of female suffrage had ever said to the contrary,
American women were entirely sensible of the obligations inherent to the
concept of citizenship and entirely willing and able to discharge them when
called upon. Why, then, if women were willing to make sacrifices on behalf of
their country, should that same country have continued to refuse them the
rewards that they were due?
Alice Paul, whose Congressional Union had
since reformed itself into the even more militant National Women’s Party, posed
essentially the same question, but more bluntly. If, as the propaganda
materials being published by the federal government insisted, the present war
was being fought to stave of the threat represented by autocratic Germany and
make the world safe for democracy and freedom, why was that same government
insistent on restricting the freedom of American women at home? Why was it so
important that France should be free if American women weren’t also going to be
extended the same privilege? Paul and the NWP had already helped organize what
came to be known as the “Silent Sentinel” protests at the beginning of 1917 –
during which, for a period of 2 ½ years, some two thousand women took turns
standing vigil outside the White House grounds while holding pro-suffrage signs
and banners – and the rapid expansion of the female workforce only seemed to
make clearer the necessity of these kinds of public campaigns. In April of
1917, at around the same time that Congress formally declared war on the German
Empire, the female suffrage amendment was introduced once again. Then, on July
4th, 1917 – in a kind of grim parody of a celebration – police
arrested over one hundred and sixty of the NWP protestors, sending most of them
to a prison in nearby Lorton, Virginia. Alice Paul was among them, and she
subsequently staged a hunger strike that resulted in physical abuse and
force-feeding. Regardless of this setback, the White House protest continued,
and over the course of the next year and a half, matters slowly came to a head.
1918, as it turned out, was a challenging
year for the administration of Woodrow Wilson. His own continuation in office
had been secured in the hard-fought and hard-won Election of 1916, it was true,
but the mid-term elections that were set to follow looked to present their own
set of challenges. The Democrats had only just maintained their control over
the House in 1916 by forging an ad-hoc alliance with what remained of
Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and it seemed likely – baring some careful
politicking by Wilson – that the Republicans would emerge victorious following
the next scheduled national poll. With New York, Oklahoma, and South Dakota
having all granted their female inhabitants the right to vote at various points
over the course of 1917, the number of states in which women’s suffrage was now
the law of the land had accordingly risen to a full fifteen. Bearing this fact
in mind – and having doubtless been at least mildly influenced by the presence
of female protestors outside his place of resident since the previous January –
President Wilson accordingly began considering throwing his support behind what
had since become known – after its now-departed chief supporter – as the
Anthony Amendment at some point in the early weeks of 1918. As luck would have
it, at around that same time, the aforementioned amendment proposal was
approved in the House by a single vote. Conscious of the support which his
party might win in the aforementioned states if it suddenly threw its weight
behind a constitutional amendment guaranteeing female suffrage, Wilson accordingly
took the unprecedented step of requesting the opportunity to address the
Senate.
The subsequent oration, delivered on September
30th, 1918, demonstrated not only the political canniness of Woodrow
Wilson but also the extent to which the rhetoric of organizations like the
NAWSA and the NWP had exerted exactly the desired effect. “Through many, many
channels,” the President began by observing,
I have been made aware what the
plain, struggling, workaday folk are thinking upon whom the chief terror and
suffering of this tragic war falls […] they think, in their logical simplicity,
that democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men
and upon an equal footing with them. If we reject measures like this, in
ignorance or defiance of what a new age has brought forth, of what they have
seen but we have not, they will cease to believe in us; they will cease to
follow or to trust us. They have seen their own governments accept this
interpretation of democracy—seen old governments like that of Great Britain,
which did not profess to be democratic, promise readily and as of course this
justice to women, though they had long before refused it, the strange
revelations of this war having made many things new and plain, to governments
as well as to peoples.
Are we alone to refuse to learn the
lesson? Are we alone to ask and take the utmost that our women can give—service
and sacrifice of every kind—and still say we do not see what title that gives
them to stand by our sides in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and
ours? 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?
Thus phrased by
Wilson – and thus influenced, no doubt, by the assertions of women like Alice
Paul – the decision of whether to grant women suffrage on a nation-wide basis
ceased to be question of intellectual or emotional suitability and instead
became one of moral and civilizational rectitude. If nations which did not come
anywhere near to valuing the concept of liberty as much as the United States
claimed to nonetheless freely granted their female citizens the right to vote –
as Great Britain indeed had done in February of 1918 – what did that say about
the purported nobility of the American experiment in self-government? Why,
indeed, should the American people have continued to trust a government which relied
on the sacrifices of American women while still refusing them this fundamental
privilege?
As Wilson continued to speak, it
likewise became clear that he had also heard and come to agree with the
arguments put forward by the likes of Carries Chapman Catt. Catt, as
aforementioned, had taken to drawing particular attention to the efforts which
American women had been exerting on behalf of the war effort and to asking, in
turn, why they were still being denied the vote. In his speech to the Senate in
September of 1918, the President seemed to grab hold of this theme and run with
it, positioning the female franchise as not only a just reward for valuable
work done but a way to strengthen the American war effort as a whole. “The
women of America [,]” he said,
Are too noble and too intelligent and
too devoted to be slackers whether you give or withhold this thing that is mere
justice; but I know the magic it will work in their thoughts and spirits if you
give it them. I propose it as I would propose to admit soldiers to the
suffrage, the men fighting in the field for our liberties and the liberties of
the world, were they excluded. The tasks of the women lie at the very heart of
the war, and I know how much stronger that heart will beat if you do this just
thing and show our women that you trust them as much as you in fact and of
necessity depend upon them.
Evidently – and
whether he would admit to it or not – the rhetoric then being deployed by
several different segments of the contemporary women’s rights movement had
managed to penetrate even the notoriously disciplined mind of one of the most
cerebral chief executives that the American republic has ever seen. Here was
Woodrow Wilson, a Princeton University history professor and a man whose
intellect was a common source of awe and respect, saying to the Senate what
Alice Paul or Carrie Chapmen Catt would almost certainly have said in his
place. This is no slight to Wilson; his eloquence and insight are quite beyond
reproach. But it would seem a bridge too far to make the claim that his
feelings on women’s suffrage only happened to coincide exactly with those of
its principal contemporary advocates. Indeed, it seems more likely that Catt
and Paul had both hit their mark, and that the President of the United States
had been successfully persuaded to offer his full-throated support to the
realization of the female franchise.
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