The Purpose and Powers of the Senate, Part XXXV: Marching as to War

    At the same time that the National Woman Suffrage Association – led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony – continued to push for bold, decisive action at the federal level – a strategy which undeniably laid the groundwork for the eventual passage of the 19^th Amendment – the American Woman Suffrage Association, under Lucy Stone, worked just as actively in the states to notch out one piecemeal victory after another. In the long run, this approach found its greatest success in the largely unsettled and often volatile West, in large part because the region’s malleable political climate. In places like Washington, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana – all of which, as of the late 1860s, were territories rather than states – executive power was vested in governors appointed by the sitting President of the United States while the members of the local legislature were popularly elected. In many cases, this resulted in a good deal of friction, particularly when the lawmakers and the aforementioned governor were each of them members of rival political parties. Working in combination with this volatile state of affairs was the understandably tense socio-political mood that prevailed for most of the period immediately following the Civil War – during which many Democrats sought to limit the effectiveness of the various Reconstruction Amendments while most Republicans sought to solidify their dominant electoral position – and the practical concerns of frontier residents eager to see their meager settlements grow and thrive. Within this specific context, the cause of women’s suffrage was able to find allies and achieve successes which would have been possible nowhere else in the contemporary United States.

    In the Wyoming Territory, for example – which had been sectioned off from the existing Dakota Territory only in 1868 – conflict between the Republican governor appointed by the Grant Administration, one John Allen Campbell (1835-1880), and the Democratic majority in the territorial legislature produced exactly this kind of outcome. Local lawmakers, on the one hand, were willing to embrace just about any policy initiative that would serve to increase the white settler population of the territory, leading them ultimately to the proposition of female suffrage. If women could be drawn to the Wyoming Territory on the promise of being able to vote in local elections, they reasoned, this would not only help alleviate the significant gender imbalance that was presently threatening to choke off local population growth, but it would also create an entire voting block – i.e., women – whose gratitude to the Democratic Party would more than likely translate itself into consistent electoral support. And on the other hand, in the face of a Republican governor who was similarly intent on enforcing the various provisions of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments as a means of encouraging Black settlement in the territory and solidifying Republican Party control, Democratic legislators also hoped to embarrass Campbell by forcing this prominent member of the nation’s dominant “progressive” party to veto the enfranchisement of Wyoming women. This latter outcome would have fewer long-term benefits, to be sure, but the notion of being able to publicly “out-moralize” the territory’s chief executive was not entirely without value. In the end, however, Campbell declined to take the bait. The women’s suffrage bill was approved by the territorial legislature by a margin of seven votes to four in early December of 1869. Several days later, after presumably thinking the matter over, Governor Campbell signed it into law. The women of the Wyoming Territory thereby became the first in the United States to gain the right to vote since New Jersey’s brief experiment with the practice ended in 1807.

    At around this same time in neighboring Utah, a similar mix of circumstances produced a very similar outcome. Formed in 1850 in response to the statehood petitions of Latter-Day Saint settlers in the Great Basis region of the American Southwest, Utah was principally inhabited by these same religious dissenters, primarily Democratic in its local political character, and administered by a Republican chief executive appointed by the Grant Administration. Unlike in Wyoming, however, where the primary practical concern of local lawmakers seemed to be remedying the regional gender imbalance as a way of increasing the territorial population, the Latter-Day Saints who functionally controlled the levers of power in Utah were instead intent on addressing what might fairly be characterized as a lingering issue with their sect’s public image. Polygamy, at that time, was a fairly common practice among adherents to the Latter-Day Saints movement, but one which persistently aroused the horror of contemporary middle-class America. Not only had the practice helped to prevent the self-proclaimed State of Deseret from being admitted to the union in 1849, but its continued existence within the subsequent Utah Territory led to a great deal of mutual distrust over the course of the 1850s, culminating in the undeclared military conflict popularly known as the Utah War between March of 1857 and July of 1858. By the 1860s, the relationship between Utah’s Latter-Day Saints and the United States Government had settled into a tense but tolerable stalemate, with local officials grudgingly adhering to federal mandates and federal officials refraining from antagonizing the local Latter-Day Saints community. Polygamy, however, remained a persistent source of tension, particularly as it negatively colored the popular image of the Latter-Day Saints movement in the eyes of the American population at large.

    In 1869, therefore, at a time when certain members of Congress were openly advocating for more stringent enforcement of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (1862) – the effect of which would have been far greater federal oversight of Latter-Day Saint-controlled Utah – the lawmakers then sitting in the territorial legislature did not need to think very hard or very long before locating the relevant friction point. To the Saints who formed the political elite in the territory, and who controlled most local offices, polygamy was a sacrament of their church left to them by its founder, Joseph Smith (1805-1844). To submit to a federal ban on the same would therefore have been tantamount to accepting the denial of their religious freedom. To the national leadership of the two dominant political parties, however, the practice of “plural marriage” was little more than barbarism. Degrading to women and counter to Christian ethics, such a practice could not possibly be allowed to continue. In an effort to break through this apparent impasse, men like William Henry Hooper (1813-1882), the Utah Territory’s Delegate to the United States Congress, accordingly hit upon the idea of passing such legislation as would grant women the right to vote. For the most part, this was intended to function as a kind of public relations campaign. As Hooper put it, the Utah legislators’ explicit intention was, “To convince the country how utterly without foundation the popular assertions were concerning the women of the Territory [.]” Pursuant to several weeks of discussion on the matter over the course of the opening months of 1870, the Utah Legislature ultimately approved the relevant suffrage bill and it became law on February 12^th. Two days later, the first female resident of Utah cast a ballot in a municipal election. In August, thousands more followed suit in that year’s general election.

    In neither of these cases, it must be said, did the NWSA or the AWSA participate directly. In Wyoming, a number of local female activists did endeavor to promote the passage of the aforementioned suffrage bill, including Redalia Bates (1844-1943), future wife of Utopian Socialist Albert Brisbane (1809-1890), and noted orator and lecturer Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932), but only on an individual basis. And in Utah, Anthony and Stanton became interested in the local campaign for women’s suffrage only after the relevant bill had been approved by the territorial legislature. The pair first arrived in the region in the summer of 1871 with the stated purpose of observing the progress of Utah’s “suffrage experiment” and ultimately ended up alienating their female hosts by delivering condescending lectures on “proper” social values in the realms of marriage and childrearing. Uninvolved though they may have been in the success of these history-making initiatives, however, the memberships of the NWSA and the AWSA did not stay uninvolved for very long. Likely encouraged by what they witnessed in the frontier West, members of both of the major national women’s rights organizations began to play  larger and larger roles in state suffrage campaigns over the course of the 1870s and 1880s, culminating in a major turning point for the movement at the dawn of the 1890s.

    In the Washington Territory, women’s suffrage became a perennial topic of political agitation over the course of the 1870s and 1880s in large part due to the persistent efforts of the NWSA and its local affiliates. First, a bill granting women the franchise was passed in 1883, only to be overturned in 1887. A second bill accomplishing the same thing was passed a year later in 1888, but this was once again overturned. In 1889, in parallel to the territory’s pending admission to the union, the Washington Women’s Suffrage Association this time worked to organize a statewide referendum, the purpose of which was to ensure that Washington formally entered the United States of America with its male and female inhabitants possessed of the same rights and privileges. Unfortunately, albeit unsurprisingly, this effort likewise ended in failure. Events in Colorado followed a broadly similar tack, with women’s suffrage organizations first attempting to make a play for female enfranchisement during the constitutional convention which preceded the territory’s transition to full-fledged statehood in 1876. This initial effort also failed – with delegates voting 24-8 against including a women’s suffrage clause in the Centennial State’s constitution – but a guarantee was nevertheless extracted from the assembled convention that a female franchise referendum would be held in 1877. In the leadup to this momentous event, rivals Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone both travelled to the state to give lectures and drum up the vote while pioneering physician Alida Avery (1833-1908) was chosen as the new president of the local NWSA affiliate. When the vote was ultimately held, however, and the ballots were finally tallied, the same result presented itself as it had the previous year.

    In the face of these failures – and in consequence of the narrowing gap between their two approaches to political activism – the NWSA and the AWSA began talk of merging beginning in the late 1880s. Dividing the resources of the women’s suffrage movement had clearly accomplished very little in the way of tangible gains since the late 1860s, and with the NWSA having more or less sworn off the kind of high-risk, high-reward tactics it favored in the early years of its existence, the time seemed right to reunify the two most powerful organizations within the American movement for women’s rights. In large part, this came about due to the efforts of one Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), daughter of AWSA founder Lucy Stone and a prominent activist in her own right. In 1887, Blackwell proposed a joint meeting of the NWSA and the AWSA during which their respective leaderships agreed to the terms of their eventual merger. Internal conflicts delayed the final realization of this agreement until the beginning of 1890, but thereafter, the dueling organizations formally ceased to exist. In their place, the National American Woman Suffrage Association – or NAWSA – was founded. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was named its first president, Lucy Stone became chair of its executive committee, and Susan B. Anthony took up the post of vice-president.

    Accordingly reenergized, the activists of the NAWSA refocused their attention on Colorado over the course of the next several years, in large part piggybacking off the efforts of local journalists like Ellis Meredith (1865-1955) and Caroline Nichols Churchill (1833-1926). Churchill in particular had been instrumental in keeping the crusade for women’s suffrage alive in Colorado over the course of the 1880s, not the least of which by founding and editing a popular weekly newspaper known after 1882 as the Queen Bee. By unflinchingly and unceasingly supporting the cause of women’s suffrage, Churchill kept the issue from ever completely losing public attention and provided the NAWSA and its affiliates with a viable platform and a set of resources which would both soon prove invaluable. Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that the last major campaign for the female franchise in Colorado had ended in defeat some sixteen years prior in 1877, a second referendum found its way onto the electoral calendar in the spring of 1893. Though its passage through the state legislature was more than a little tumultuous – and though the local NAWSA affiliate had less than thirty dollars to its name at the time – the announcement of the pending vote was greeted with widespread enthusiasm and a generous outpouring of support. The aforementioned Ellis Meredith appealed to the national leadership of the NAWSA for support, which said leadership answered by soliciting donations from around the country. Women’s clubs throughout the state sprang into action handing out leaflets and organizing rallies, and Meredith’s fellow journalist Minnie Reynolds (1865-1936) convinced three-quarters of the state’s newspaper editors to publish pro-suffrage materials. When the vote was finally held in November and the ballots finally tallied, the result was the reverse of what it had been in 1877. With a turnout of fifty-five percent, the referendum passed by margin of 35,798 to 29,451. The women of Colorado had successfully gained the right to vote.     

    Notwithstanding this impressive turnaround, the fortunes of the women’s rights movement in America were decidedly uneven for the next several years. In Idaho, on the one hand, the same kind of energetic and well-organized support for female suffrage led to the passage of an amendment to the state’s constitution granting women the right to vote only three years later in 1896. Unfortunately, this – along with the aforementioned referendum in Colorado – would prove to be the high point of the female suffrage campaign for the remainder of the century as disagreements between Anthony and Stanton and the rest of the NAWSA began to sap the organization’s strength. Anthony, for one, wanted to refocus the movement’s energies on a women’s suffrage amendment, specifically by mandating that every national meeting be held in Washington, D.C. so that the various assembled delegates could bring their collective pressure to bear. The general membership, however, strongly disagreed with this approach and ended up voting to continue shifting the site of the NAWSA’s annual convention so as to build on the successful campaigns that had thus far been waged in the states. Stanton, meanwhile, in collaboration with a committee of twenty-six other women, published the first volume of the provocatively titled Women’s Bible in 1895, the express intention of which was to decouple the Christian liturgy from its customary use as a justification for male dominance in Western society. Willingly courting controversy – indeed, Stanton remarked during a European sojourn at the beginning of the decade that, “I am in the sunset of life, and I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear” – the book sold exceptionally well, though it ultimately resulting in Stanton’s exile from any continued position of leadership. So scandalized was the comparatively conservative majority of the NAWSA’s membership that they voted to actively denounce the work. Stanton would never again wield her accustomed influence over the American movement for women’s rights.

    Fortunately, at around the same time that these very public disagreements were threatening to once again tear the movement for women’s rights apart just as it was beginning to build up a degree of political momentum, a woman named Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was in the process of rebuilding the NAWSA along much more effective lines. A protégé of both Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony, Catt became chair of the NAWSA’s organizing committee in 1895 and proceeded to reorient the flagging movement towards a series of clearly stated and achievable goals. Then, in 1900 when Anthony finally decided to retire from her position as President of the NAWSA – an office which she had in turn inherited when Stanton retired several years earlier – Catt was the person she tapped to be her successor. The result of was a further consolidation of the NAWSA’s resources and the beginnings of the process which would ultimately bring about the ratification of the 19^th Amendment.

    One of Catt’s major innovations in this direction was her successful attempt to make women’s suffrage a common topic of conversation in the various women’s social clubs that had sprung up across the country over the course of the late 19^th century. Focused mostly on literary activities or self-improvement, these grassroots organizations eventually evolved into civic activist associations whose philosophical foundation was that the supposedly superior moral sensibilities of the feminine gender made them especially well suited to addressing the various ills of American life. Seeking to gain influence within this existing structure of activism, Catt accordingly made a point of courting and recruiting some of the wealthiest members of the nation’s various women’s clubs for the purpose of harnessing their resources and turning their influence to political advantage. The results were exceptionally impressive. Before 1900, the rule of thumb in most of the clubs was to avoid addressing explicitly political issues so as not to risk alienating either potential members or the general public. By 1914, however – thanks to Catt’s studious efforts – the General Federation of Women's Clubs had officially endorsed the cause of women’s suffrage. The movement for female enfranchisement could thereafter claim a presence in town and cities across the nation.

    At the same time that Catt was building the foundation of what would later prove to be a groundswell of national support for women’s suffrage, efforts continued in the various states to secure the female franchise on a piecemeal basis. In the State of Washington, for example, the repeated reverses of the 1880s finally gave way – thanks largely to the efforts of Emma Smith DeVoe (1848-1927) – to the successful passage of a constitutional amendment enfranchising local women in 1910. And while a similar measure that had been put to the voters of California in 1896 had gone down to failure – the same year, in fact, as the successful campaign in Idaho – women’s suffrage once again appeared on the ballot in the Golden State in October of 1911. In the intervening years, activists like Mary Simpson Sperry (1833-1921), Mary McHenry Keith (1855-1947), and the aforementioned Ellen Clark Sargent (1826-1911) had organized rallies, penned editorials, and lobbied state politicians, while the likes of Lydia Flood Jackson (1862-1963) had rallied the state’s Black women’s clubs to the cause of suffrage and Maria Guadalupe Evangelina de Lopez (1881-1977) both led the College Equal Suffrage League and become the suffrage movement’s primary spokesperson among the state’s Spanish-speaking communities. By the time of the second referendum, the stage had accordingly been set for victory. In the resulting campaign, local activists continued this tradition of energetic advocacy by passing out some three million pages of pro-suffrage literature and approximately ninety thousand pro-suffrage buttons. In the end, to the tune of some 3,500 votes – most of which were concentrated in the rural north of the state – the ballot proposition was passed, granting California women the right to vote. The following year, in 1912, Oregon followed suit, thanks principally to the efforts of newspaper editor and longtime activist Abigail Scott Duniway (1834-1915). Little by little, a sense of momentum was building. The wave was cresting; the passage of the 19^th Amendment was drawing near.