Woman Suffrage Movement

The first formal demand for equal political rights for women was made by Elizabeth Cady Stanton at the 1848 Seneca Falls, New York, Women's Rights Convention. Woman suffrage was initially controversial, even among the radical pioneers of the women's rights movement, because electoral politics was held in low repute and partisanship was considered fundamentally male. The Civil War and the abolition of slavery, however, moved questions of citizenship and enfranchisement to the forefront of the national political agenda. By 1866, suffrage had become the foremost demand among women's rights activists.

At war's end, Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and other woman suffrage leaders expected that white women would win the vote along with freedmen and freedwomen in a single, comprehensive act of universal enfranchisement. Yet the Republican authors of the Fifteenth Amendment refused to include "sex" along with "race, color, or previous condition of servitude" as federally prohibited grounds for disfranchisement. Disagreeing over how to proceed, the woman suffrage forces in 1869 formed two rival organizations, the National and the American woman suffrage associations. In a final effort to secure the vote as part of postwar Reconstruction, the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Anthony, advanced a daring constitutional argument, claiming that because women had been made national citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment, they already possessed the franchise, the defining right of citizenship. The U.S. Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett (1875) rejected this argument: While women were indeed citizens, the Court declared, voting was a privilege, not a right.

Although stalled constitutionally, the movement gained many adherents. In the 1880s, Frances Willard's Woman's Christian Temperance Union endorsed woman suffrage as the best means to control liquor and protect the home. By 1890, woman suffrage, originally a radical demand among a small group of reformers, had gained respectability among middle-class American women. That year, the two rival organizations merged, forming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). With respectability, however, the suffrage movement, forged in the fires of the antislavery crusade, became increasingly conservative and racist in its arguments. African-American women, who well knew the power of the vote, formed their own woman suffrage societies.

The constitutional upheavals of the Reconstruction Era had left unresolved the question of whether the states or the federal government controlled the right to vote. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, woman suffrage advocates concentrated on particular states. The first breakthroughs came in the West where the democratic politics of radical populism opened up political space for the enfranchisement of women. In 1869 and 1870, the territorial legislatures of Wyoming and Utah respectively enacted woman suffrage provisions and retained these provisions through the process of becoming states (although Congress, reflecting anti-Mormon sentiment, objected strongly in the case of Utah). In 1893, a majority of Colorado's male voters approved a woman suffrage provision to their state constitution; Idaho (1896), Washington (1910), and California (1911) followed. By 1912, women had full voting rights in ten states, all west of the Mississippi River. But in 1915, voters in four heavily urbanized eastern states with large immigrant populations--New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts--decisively defeated woman suffrage referenda. At this point, suffrage strategy shifted back to amending the federal Constitution.

By the first decade of the twentieth century, as the Progressive reform movement flourished, the suffrage movement itself was also changing. Heavy immigration, urbanization, an expanding female labor force, and rising numbers of college-educated women altered both the composition and the tactics of suffragism. New organizations oriented toward wage-earning women arose in New York and San Francisco. Women college graduates also flooded into the movement. These new suffragists took to the streets, organizing mass parades, automobile caravans, and soapbox speaking. Carrie Chapman Catt, alert to new trends but cautious about innovations, consolidated these changes within NAWSA.

In 1913, Alice Paul formed a second national organization, the Congressional Union, to pursue more aggressively a woman suffrage constitutional amendment. Determined to use the voting women of the ten "suffrage states" as a lever in national politics, these militants in 1916 urged western women to vote against President Woodrow Wilson on the grounds that he was antisuffrage. After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the Congressional Union switched to tactics of public protest. They picketed the White House carrying signs denouncing Wilson. When many were arrested, they insisted that they were political prisoners and engaged in civil disobedience. Meanwhile, the moderates of the NAWSA concentrated on Congressional lobbying. In 1920, the combination of approaches, and the transformations of World War I, finally led to the passage and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Seventy-two years after Seneca Falls, national woman suffrage had been achieved.

Related Articles in The Oxford Companion to United States History

Antislavery; Feminism; League of Women Voters; Mormonism; Nineteenth Amendment; Populist Era; Progressive Era; Seneca Falls Convention; Slavery; Suffrage; Women in the Labor Force; Women's Club Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Aileen Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920, 1965. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869, 1978. Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Suffrage Movement, 1995. Eleanor Flexner with Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States, enlarged ed., 1996.

Ellen C. DuBois