Womens Rights Essay, Research Paper
The Women’s suffrage movement in the
United States
The suffragist movement in the United States was an outgrowth of the
general women’s rights movement that officially began with the Seneca
Falls Convention of 1848. Several leading figures in the antislavery
movement had also begun to question the political and economic
subjugation of women in a society that claimed to be a democracy.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha C, Wright, and Mary Ann
McClintock issued a call for a convention concerning the rights of
women. That convention met in Seneca Falls, New York on 19-20 July
1848.
The convention adopted a “Declaration of Principles,” deliberately
modeled on the Declaration of Independence, which stated, “We hold
these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created
equal. . . .” In addition to the Declaration of Principles, the Seneca
Convention also asserted that women should have the right to preach,
to be educated, to teach, and to earn a living. The delegates passed a
resolution stating that “it is the sacred duty of the women of this
country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective
franchise.” With these words the struggle began in earnest to win full
voting rights for women in the United States.
The most influential leaders of the women’s rights movement in the
second half of the nineteenth century were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony. But the united struggle for women’s voting rights
broke into two factions following the Civil War. Led by Anthony and
Stanton, those who believed that they should seek an amendment to
the U.S. Constitution formed the National Woman Suffrage Association in
May of 1869. Later that same year, the American Woman Suffrage
Association was formed by those who believed the most effective
strategy would be to pressure state legislatures to amend state
constitutions. The leaders of this group were Lucy Stone and Julia Ward
Howe.
The two organizations merged in 1890, as the National American Woman
Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with the intention of simultaneously
pursuing both strategies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton became the first
president of the new organization (1890-1892), followed by Susan B.
Anthony (1892-1900), Carrie Chapman Catt (1900-1904), Anna Howard
Shaw (1904-1915), and then Catt again (1915-1920). In 1920, when
NAWSA was dissolved after achieving its goal of women’s suffrage, it
was replaced by the National league of Women Voters-established in
Chicago in 1920 to educate women about how to use the newly won
vote. In time the National League of Women Voters became the League
of Women Voters, which currently operates under that same name.
When the National League of Women Voters was first established, Carrie
Chapman Catt was elected as its honorary president.
The efforts of the women’s suffrage organizations met with determined
resistance. By seeking a voice in politics, women were challenging the
conventional belief that women’s proper sphere of influence was
domestic, while men properly dominated the public sphere, including the
political process. Even many women deplored the effort to extend the
vote to women. In 1911, Josephine Dodge, the wife of a leading New
York capitalist, formed the National Association Opposed to Woman
Suffrage. Like many other anti-suffragists, Dodge advised women to
influence policy from behind the scenes, through their influence on men.
By involving themselves in politics, she insisted, women would undermine
their moral and spiritual role, as well as create chaos by meddling in
matters that were beyond their understanding.
The first partial suffrage was achieved when some states allowed
widows to vote in school board elections, which many people considered
to be a reasonable extension of a woman’s concern for issues having to
do with home and family.
The first extension of full voting rights to women came in 1869, in the
Wyoming Territory. When Wyoming entered the Union as a state in
1890, it was also the first state to provide for women’s suffrage in its
constitution. In 1893, Colorado extended the franchise to women,
followed by Utah and Idaho in 1896. Fourteen years later, in 1910, the
state of Washington also enfranchised women. One by one over the
next eight years, states began to grant voting rights to women:
California (1911); Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon (1912); the Alaska
Territory (1913); Montana and Nevada (1914); New York (1917);
Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Dakota (1918).
In Illinois women won the right to participate at the federal level by
voting in presidential elections (1913). Nebraska, North Dakota, and
Rhode Island followed (1917), then Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota,
Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, and Wisconsin (1919).
This piecemeal pattern of suffrage achieved to varying degrees, state
by state, was a slow and uncertain process. The leaders of the
suffragist movement understood that even as they pursued such
state-by-state tactics, they must also push for full suffrage at the
national level, which could only be achieved through an amendment to
the U.S. Constitution. Just such an amendment, called the “Anthony
Amendment,” was introduced in the Senate in 1878, but was defeated
by a vote of 34 to 16. The Amendment read, “The right 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.” The same amendment was
reintroduced in each succeeding Congress, but made no progress until
1914, when NAWSA presented Congress with a petition signed by more
than half a million people. The amendment was defeated in the Senate
by a close vote of 35 to 34 in 1914, and in the House the next year by a
vote of 204 to 174. Though both votes fell short of the necessary
two-thirds majority, they were much closer than past votes had been.
In an attempt to rally national support for the Anthony Amendment,
Alice Paul organized a huge parade down Pennsylvania Avenue on the
day before President Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration. But the
peaceful parade degenerated into a riot when thousands of hostile male
spectators broke into the ranks of the marchers and tried to block their
passage. Essentially, the women had to fight their way down
Pennsylvania Avenue, with the help of men who supported the women’s
suffrage movement. Troops had to be called in to restore order, and
hundreds of people were hospitalized.
Later in 1913 Alice Paul organized the Congressional Union, later called
the Woman’s Party, to lobby Congress on behalf of a constitutional
amendment granting the vote to women. Paul modeled her organization
after the more militant suffragists in Great Britain. The Woman’s Party
directly confronted those in power with the discrepancy between
America’s supposed ideals and the reality that more than half of its adult
citizens were not enfranchised. In 1917 the Woman’s Party embarrassed
President Wilson by picketing the White House around the clock. When
many of the demonstrators were arrested and jailed, they went on a
hunger strike and were force-fed.
In both cases-the 1913 parade and the brutal force-feeding of jailed
women in 1917-the abuse suffered by respectable middle-class women
outraged public sympathy and elicited sympathy for the suffragist
cause. Such sympathy was reinforced by a shift in the tactics used by
some of the movement’s leaders. They began to argue for women’s
suffrage within the framework of traditional views about women’s proper
role in society. Rather than focusing on issues of justice or equal rights,
they argued instead that women would bring their moral superiority and
maternal instincts into the often brutal arena of politics. Thus the image
of the suffrage movement began to be softened for public consumption.
Suffragists were no longer seen merely as radicals who wished to disrupt
the natural social order, but rather as agents for extending female
benevolence outward from the family to society as a whole.
This image was also helped by the fact that in the 1890s the suffragists
had allied with the Women’s Christian Union (WCTU). Although the
WCTU’s main objective was to enact restrictive liquor laws, the group
also agitated for social reform on many other fronts. The WCTU came to
support the cause of women’s suffrage on the grounds that without the
vote women lacked the power to protect home and family and to defend
morality.
The active participation of women in the nation’s war effort from 1917
to 1918 also helped to win support for a constitutional amendment
enfranchising women. By a vote of 274 to 136 the amendment was
passed by the House on 10 January 1918. On 4 June 1918, it was
passed in the Senate by a vote of 66 to 30. On 18 August 1920
Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment, and
it officially became part of the U.S. Constitution on 26 August 1920, as
the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Although women had finally won full voting rights, they did not really
begin to have access to most political offices until well into the 19702,
and even today, at the start of a new millennium, women are found in
political office at a rate far lower than one would expect from a group
that represents one-half of the nation’s population. Furthermore,
women’s access to the highest and most powerful political offices is still
severely limited, both by prejudice and by the shortage of female
office-holders at all levels, for it is from the ranks of such lower-level
office-holders that the candidates for the highest offices are recruited.
While many other nations have accepted the leadership of women, the
United States is still unlikely to accept the idea of a woman as
president-at least for now.