At the beginning of the 20th century, the woman suffrage movement, founded at women’s rights conventions in the 1840s and 1850s, reached a watershed. The generation of pioneer leaders, including such notable suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Sojourner Truth, had passed from the scene. Susan B. Anthony, considered by many suffragists as “the mother of us all,” resigned as president of the National American Woman SuffRAGE Association (NAWSA), having reached her 80th birthday. In 1900, women had the right to vote only in four western states (Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho). Lacking financial support, with a small and dispersed membership, disorganized leaders, and facing a long dry spell in suffrage activity, NAWSA elected Anthony’s handpicked protegee, Carrie Chapman Catt, as its next president.
In the next two decades, Catt had an enormous impact on reorganizing and revitalizing the suffrage at both the federal level and in the states. As NAWSA president from 1900 to 1905 and again from 1916 to 1920, Catt recruited prestigious members of society (Catt’s “society plan”) to the suffrage ranks and, in doing so, established the credibility and respectability of the suffrage cause. Further, NAWSA was able to fill its empty coffers with the funds gained from new converts. By shepherding its resources and focusing on winnable state-level campaigns, NAWSA was able to overcome the long gap between suffrage victories and gain the vote for women in Washington State in 1910 and in California the following year. In each campaign, precinct-level organization, and the coalition among progressive reformers, proved crucial.
Suffrage supporters faced strong opposition from organized ANTl-suffRAGists, due to widespread beliefs about women’s traditional role, but the public often had other fears. Giving women the right to vote radically expanded the electorate, and it was, along with other democratic reforms, controversial in the magnitude of its action. Since the late 19th century, anti-suffrage leagues brought together those who wanted to restrict the ballot with those who reacted against women entering public life. Yet, by 1910, the “society plan” had given new respectability and new resources to the struggle for woman suffrage. Catt’s choice of a more consciously political strategy to educate public opinion and mobilize citizens in favor of women’s right to vote brought NAWSA a wave of new members. As a matter of expediency, she also downplayed the historic role of racial equality in the struggle for women’s rights. Some suffragists argued for literacy tests for voters and for women to have admission to whites-only primaries in the segregated South, among other ways of restricting the vote. Catt, however, did not accept the southern states’ rights strategy that would have rejected a federal amendment entirely. African-American women, for the most part, organized their own suffrage organizations when faced with these segregationist sentiments. Support for woman suffrage was, on the whole, stronger in the black community than among whites. But while suffragists conflicted with each other in such key areas as organizing among wage-earning women, racial equality, states’ rights, and the importance of a federal amendment, the woman suffrage movement rapidly gained ground under Catt’s plan.
By the 1910s, Catt’s deliberate organization and the seeming incompetence of then NAWSA president, Anna Howard Shaw, made younger women impatient. Working with such leaders as Alice Stone Blackwell and Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughters of suffrage pioneers, a younger generation of suffragists mobilized in support of women’s right to vote through independent means and organizations. The College Equal Suffrage League, the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women, and Political Equality Association, among many others, began to shift interests away from the gradualism advocated by NAWSA into more militant tactics and publicity-minded campaigns. Blatch and others created new forms of protest, borrowing from other social movement traditions, and inaugurated suffrage parades and motorcades and street corner debates,
The most important of these efforts came originally under the wing of NAWSA, when it formed its Congressional Committee to pursue the question of a federal woman suffrage amendment. Led by Alice Paul, the committee soon left NAWSA’s ranks to form the Congressional Union (CU), reorganized as the National Woman’s Party in 1916. What the Congressional Union attempted to do was to redirect the efforts and resources of the woman suffrage movement away from state-by-state campaigns toward the passage and ratification of what came to be called the Anthony Amendment, in honor of the great suffragist. State campaigns had exhausted the energies of an entire generation, and yet by 1914 women could vote in only a handful of states. By working toward a federal amendment, long the ambition of both Anthony and Stanton, women would be granted the vote not by separate state campaigns but in one sweeping piece of legislation.
The tactics of the young radical suffragists extended the pressure tactics of public lobby and petition campaigns to hold the party in office responsible. They sought to make a politician’s failure to support woman suffrage costly. Borrowing heavily from British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Political Union, the Congressional Union adopted militant protest as its hallmark. In 1917 it developed the Silent Sentinel campaign to picket the White House nonstop until then-president Woodrow Wilson agreed to support woman suffrage. When women were arrested in the course of picketing, CU members, following the lead of British suffragists, went on hunger strikes to arouse public sympathy.
In 1915, after a 10-year hiatus, Carrie Chapman Catt once again became president of NAWSA. She returned with a campaign of her own design, the “Winning Plan” for a federal amendment. Catt offered the suffrage movement a centralized, efficient, and partisan means of achieving the goal of woman suffrage. To stop wasting time on endless state-level campaigns, NAWSA was now to join ranks with those who proposed and supported a federal amendment granting women the right to vote. Rather than spend time petitioning and lobbying countless state legislatures, NAWSA, through its Congressional Committee, was to take on the job of persuading a majority of congressmen and senators to shift their votes toward woman suffrage. As part of the move to focus all energies on the federal Anthony amendment, Catt also centralized decision making in the hands of the Executive Board, which she appointed. Catt’s goal was to “keep the suffrage noise up” all around the country in order to ensure the ultimate victory for women’s vote. She was vastly helped by money from the widow of publisher Frank Leslie, who willed her estate to NAWSA to fund suffrage work.
During World War I, woman suffragists faced a central dilemma. They were divided not only on issues of strategy and tactics, but also about the war itself. When the United States entered the war in 1917, there were many suffragists who opposed the war, both due to their pacifism and also because they viewed America’s participation as wrong. For Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, the war was irrelevant to the goal of winning the vote for women, an attitude for which they were widely condemned. A founding member of the Woman’s Peace Party, Carrie Chapman Catt set aside her pacifism with a pragmatic understanding that opposition to the war effort would only undermine the case for woman suffrage. She served during the war on the Woman’s Committee on National Defense, which coordinated women’s volunteer work in support of the war.
In 1918, women’s support for American participation in the war persuaded some politicians to end their opposition to woman suffrage and vote for the federal amendment. Supported now by President Wilson, what became the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote, passed the House of Representatives. The Senate, after voting it down in 1918, passed the federal amendment in 1919. NAWSA, the National Woman’s Party, and other suffrage organizations now swung into action in the ratification campaign. Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment in August of 1920, and woman suffrage was finally a reality throughout the United States.
Further reading: Ellen Carol DuBois, Harriot Stanton Blatch and the Winning of Wo-man Suffrage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States, enl. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996); Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996); Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vo-te Was Won: Wo-man Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868-1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
World History
