Middle-class reformers such as Jane Addams, founder of the famous settlement house, Hull House, in Chicago and Florence Kelley, Executive Secretary of the National Consumer’s League, were strong supporters of woman suffrage. And labor leaders including Rose Schneiderman, labor organizer and speaker with the Women’s Trade Union League, and Agnes Nestor, President of the International Globe Workers Union, worked hard for suffrage as a means of achieving improved conditions for workers.
Many working-class women joined the movement, welcomed by middle-class leaders such as Harriot Stanton Blatch (who had objected to the NAWSA’s “society plan”) who worked to unite women of all classes into a revitalized suffrage movement. As opponents were quick to point out, many socialists supported woman suffrage, though some socialists who were more radical in approach including Emma Goldman thought it foolish to expect that much progress would come from female enfranchisement. As in the case of temperance and suffrage, however, the idea that women would support Progressive reforms provoked opposition: industries that stood to lose from Progressive reform, such as the cotton textile industry of the South, joined the liquor industry as formidable opponents of woman suffrage, and worked together with the growing number of antisuffrage organizations to oppose state suffrage referenda.
Around 1912, the increased support for suffrage resulting from the Progressive movement, and the series of victories in the western states seemed to breathe new life into suffragists all over America. The return of Alice Paul from England, where she was inspired by the energy and boldness of the “militant” British suffragists, was also a major factor in the new suffrage activism.
Paul and her followers had no patience with the slow, state-by-state plodding that had consumed the NAWSA’s energies since the 1890’s, and demanded that the organization focus its attention almost exclusively upon the federal amendment. Though this infuriated a minority of southern suffragists who were states’ rights activists and supported female enfranchisement by state action only, the NAWSA did indeed renew its campaign for a federal amendment–but not before it parted company with Paul and her followers.
The central issue in this new rift in the suffrage forces was Paul’s advocacy of a strategy derived from the British suffragists, to oppose the “party-in-power” until it adopted woman suffrage, a strategy that violated the NAWSA’s longstanding policy of non-partisanship. Forming their own organization, soon known as the National Woman’s Party (NWP), Paul and her followers continued to pursue a federal amendment using bold new tactics, many of them directed at forcing President Wilson to support the federal amendment; these ranged from mobilizing women voters in western states against Wilson’s re-election in 1916 to burning his war-time speeches in praise of democracy publicly in front of the White House.
Carrie Chapman Catt was also eager for the NAWSA to bring the long struggle to a conclusion with the adoption of the federal suffrage amendment. Her return to the NAWSA presidency in late 1915 and the adoption shortly thereafter of her “Winning Plan” harnessed the power of the massive but sluggish NAWSA and initiated the final, victorious suffrage drive. Catt insisted that further state work was vital, but made it clear that the federal amendment was still the ultimate goal. Her plan called for suffragists in states, which had not adopted woman suffrage–and where a victory seemed possible–to launch campaigns at once. In states where defeat was likely, she insisted that suffragists avoid such an embarrassment to the cause and seek only partial suffrage–municipal, presidential, or primary suffrage–as they thought best. She urged suffragists in states where women already voted to pressure on their national representatives to support the federal amendment.
Meanwhile Catt and her lieutenants, Maud Wood Park and Helen Gardner, worked hard to convince President Wilson to support woman suffrage by federal as well as state means, and conducted a massive lobbying effort to enlist congressional support. And when the United States entered World War I, Catt put aside her own pacifism and urged suffragists to support the war effort–a policy which enhanced the patriotic image of the movement with the public and powerful decision makers, including Wilson. A growing number of state victories and Woodrow Wilson’s conversion (he began working for the federal amendment in 1918) eventually led Congress to approve the Nineteenth Amendment and to submit it to the states in June 1919.
Historians debate the relative contributions of Catt and the NAWSA vs. Paul and the NWP to the victory in Congress. But clearly Catt’s careful coordination of suffragists all over the nation and skillful political maneuvering, together with the pressure of Wilson and members of Congress that Paul and her followers applied by less orthodox methods of persuasion, were all major factors.
Thirty-six states had to ratify the amendment before it could become law. As the struggle over ratification began, Illinois and Wisconsin competed for the honor of the being the first to ratify, while Georgia and Alabama scrambled to be the first to pass a “rejection resolution.” Most states took longer to act, and many battles were hard fought, with suffragists and antisuffragists using all powers of persuasion at their command. By the summer of 1920, suffragists were dismayed to find that while only one more state was needed, no further legislative sessions were scheduled before the November 1920 election. Desperate, suffragists began pleading for special sessions. President Wilson was finally able to pressure the reluctant governor of Tennessee into calling such a session.
Thus the final battle over woman suffrage took place in Nashville, Tennessee in the long, hot summer of 1920. In that final, dramatic contest, antisuffragists as well as suffragists from all over the nation descended upon the state in a bitter struggle over ideology and influence. Despite the glare of national publicity, the suffragists watched with dismay as a comfortable margin in favor of ratification gradually disappeared, and they were quite uncertain of the result when the vote took place. When, on August 18, it appeared that Tennessee had ratified–the result of one twenty-four-year-old legislator from the mountains (Harry Burn) changing his vote at the insistence of his elderly mother–the antis still managed to delay official ratification through parliamentary tricks. While antisuffrage legislators fled the state to avoid a quorum, their associates held massive antisuffrage rallies and otherwise attempted to convince pro-suffrage legislators to oppose ratification. Finally, Tennessee reaffirmed its vote for ratification, and the Nineteenth Amendment was officially added to the United States Constitution on August 26, 1920.
Powerful and intelligent women led the way, providing every woman with political options. Women such as Anthony, Stanton, Mott, and others, held the greatest advantage. Each of them held the passion and determination necessary to win the battle for women s rights. With this superior force, women battled for their rights step by step, addressing one issue and then another. The Seneca Falls Convention was an important corner stone for all women. Congress, along with state government heard for the first time the discriminations and solutions to unjust chauvinism. However, Congress believed there were more important issues to govern. At first the Civil Rights movement seemed to be a hindrance to the woman s suffrage movement by taking priority over it. Looking back into history, the outlaw of slavery and the right for Blacks to vote proved to be used by women as a great advantage. It was the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, which brought motivation and credence into the women s suffrage movement. Without the Fifteenth Amendment, the right to vote may had been missed by more generations of women.
Works Cited
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