Learning Objectives
- Describe the origins and growth of the women’s rights movement leading to the passage of the 19th amendment
Figure 1. The western states were the first to allow women the right to vote, a freedom that grew out of the less deeply entrenched gendered spheres in the region. This illustration, from 1915, shows a suffragist holding a torch over the western states and inviting the beckoning women from the rest of the country to join her.
The Progressive drive for a more perfect democracy and social justice also fostered the growth of two new movements that attacked the oldest and most long-standing betrayals of the American promise of equal opportunity and citizenship—the disfranchisement of women and the lack of civil rights for African Americans. African Americans across the nation identified an agenda for civil rights and economic opportunity during the Progressive Era, but they disagreed strongly on how to meet these goals in the face of broad discrimination and disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence in the South. And beginning in the late nineteenth century, the women’s movement cultivated a cadre of new leaders, national organizations, and competing rationales for women’s rights—especially the right to vote.
It would be suffrage, ultimately, that would mark the full emergence of women in American public life. Generations of women—and, occasionally, men—had organized and worked for women’s suffrage. Suffragists’ efforts resulted in slow but encouraging steps forward during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Notable victories were won in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to experimental forms of governance. By 1911, six western states had passed suffrage amendments to their constitutions.
Figure 2. Women suffragists in Ohio sought to educate and convince men that they should support a woman’s right to vote. As the feature below on the backlash against suffragists illustrates, it was a far from simple task.
Leaders Emerge in the Women’s Movement
Women like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley were instrumental in the early Progressive settlement house movement, and female leaders dominated organizations such as the WCTU and the Anti-Saloon League. From these earlier efforts came new leaders who, in their turn, focused their efforts on the key goal of the Progressive Era as it pertained to women: the right to vote.
Women had first formulated their demand for the right to vote in the Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York, and saw their first opportunity of securing suffrage during Reconstruction when legislators, driven by racial animosity, sought to enfranchise women to counter the votes of Black men following the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment. By 1900, the western frontier states of Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming had already responded to the suffragists by granting women the right to vote in state and local elections.
Figure 3. Suffragette, advocate, sociologist, and lawyer Alice Paul.
These states conceded to the suffragists’ demands largely to attract more women settlers to these male-dominated regions. Despite such accommodations, it was still a challenge to show that women’s lives in the West rarely fit with the nineteenth-century ideology of gendered “separate spheres” that had legitimized the exclusion of women from the rough-and-tumble party competitions of public politics. In 1890, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) organized several hundred state and local chapters to urge the passage of a federal amendment to guarantee a woman’s right to vote. Its leaders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were veterans of the suffrage movement and had formulated the first demand for the right to vote at Seneca Falls in 1848. Under the subsequent leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, beginning in 1900, the group decided to make suffrage its first priority. Soon, its membership began to grow. Using modern marketing efforts like celebrity endorsements to attract a younger audience, the NAWSA became a significant political pressure group for the passage of a suffrage amendment to the Constitution.
For some in the NAWSA, however, the pace of change was too slow. Frustrated with the lack of response by state and national legislators, Alice Paul, who joined the organization in 1912, sought to expand the scope of the group as well as to adopt more direct protest tactics to draw greater media attention. When others in the group were unwilling to move in her direction, Paul split from the NAWSA to create the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, later renamed the National Woman’s Party, in 1913. Known as the Silent Sentinels, Paul and her group picketed outside the White House for nearly two years, starting in 1917. In the latter stages of their protests, many women, including Paul, were arrested and thrown in jail, where they staged a hunger strike as self-proclaimed political prisoners. Prison guards ultimately force-fed Paul to keep her alive. At a time—during World War I—when women volunteered as army nurses, worked in vital defense industries, and supported President Wilson’s campaign to “make the world safe for democracy,” the scandalous mistreatment of Paul embarrassed Wilson. Enlightened as to the injustice affecting American women, he changed his position in support of a woman’s constitutional right to vote.
Figure 4. Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels picketed outside the White House for almost two years, and, when arrested, went on hunger strike until they were force-fed in order to save their lives.
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Alice Paul, a descendent of William Penn, had an impressive educational background. Graduating at the top of her class, she then attended Swarthmore College, earned a Master of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania in 1907, then Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham, England, and took economics classes from the University of Birmingham, eventually returning to the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned a Ph.D. in sociology. Her dissertation was entitled “The Legal Position of Women in Pennsylvania”; it discussed the history of the women’s movement in Pennsylvania and the rest of the U.S., and promoted suffrage as the key issue of the day. Paul later received her law degree (LL.B) from the Washington College of Law at American University in 1922, after the suffrage fight was over. In 1927, she earned a master of laws degree, and in 1928, a doctorate in civil law from American University.
Watch this video from the Alice Paul Institute about the mistreatment and imprisonment of many of the suffragettes.
The Nineteenth Amendment
In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for a constitutional amendment, and two years later women’s suffrage became a reality.
While Catt and Paul used different strategies, their combined efforts brought enough pressure to bear for Congress to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, which prohibited voter discrimination on the basis of sex, during a special session in the summer of 1919. Subsequently, the required thirty-six states approved its adoption, with Tennessee doing so in August of 1920, in time for that year’s presidential election. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. They were driven by the promise of change but also in some cases by their anxieties about the future. Much had changed since their campaign began; the United States was now more industrial than not, increasingly more urban than rural. The activism and activities of these new urban denizens also gave rise to a new American culture.
LINK TO LEARNING
Some suffragists, even outside the South, argued that White women’s votes were necessary to maintain White supremacy. Many White American women argued that enfranchising White upper- and middle-class women would counteract Black voters. Despite this, many Black women fought tirelessly towards the passage of the 19th amendment, including Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Sojourner Truth.
The Anti-Suffragist Movement
Figure 5. The anti-suffrage group used ridicule and embarrassment to try and sway the public away from supporting a woman’s right to vote.
The early suffragists may have believed that the right to vote was a universal one, but they faced waves of discrimination and ridicule from both men and women. The image below shows one of the organizations pushing back against the movement, but much of the anti-suffrage campaign was carried out through ridiculing postcards and signs that showed suffragists as sexually wanton, grasping, irresponsible, or impossibly ugly. Men in anti-suffragist posters were depicted as henpecked, crouching to clean the floor, while their suffragist wives marched out the door to campaign for the vote. They also showed cartoons of women gambling, drinking, and smoking cigars, that is, taking on men’s vices, once they gained voting rights.
Other anti-suffragists believed that women could better influence the country from outside the realm of party politics, through their clubs, petitions, and churches. Many women also opposed women’s suffrage because they thought the dirty world of politics was a morass to which ladies should not be exposed. The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage formed in 1911; around the country, state representatives used the organization’s speakers, funds, and literature to promote the anti-suffragist cause. As the link below illustrates, the suffragists endured much prejudice and backlash in their push for equal rights and fair representation.
Link to Learning
Browse this collection of anti-suffragist cartoons to see examples of the stereotypes and fear-mongering that the anti-suffragist campaign promoted.
Watch It
This video explains the women’s suffrage movement and other social reform movements led by women during the Progressive Era, including Jane Addams, Alice Paul, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, among others.
You can view the transcript for “Women’s Suffrage: Crash Course US History #31” here (opens in new window).
For a light-hearted review of the 19th Amendment, watch this classic School House Rock song “Sufferin’ Till Suffrage”.
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Glossary
Nineteenth Amendment: granted women the constitutional right to vote
Seneca Falls Convention: 1848 suffragist meeting where the Declaration of Sentiments was drafted, outlining a set of demands that would help to secure the right of women to vote
Silent Sentinels: women protesters who picketed the White House for years to protest for women’s right to vote; they went on a hunger strike after their arrest, and their force-feeding became a national scandal