Woman Suffrage: Writers’ false representation as “Women’s” Suffrage

History’s documents “Woman” Suffrage

W

oman Suffrage Struggle: pre-Abolition 1840 through (nonwhite womanhood excluded) 1920 Nineteenth Amendment

Woman Suffrage Timeline (1840-1920)      

• 1840:  World Anti-Slavery Convention (London, England) bars Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton from attendance          

• 1848: Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton convene the first United States Woman’s Rights Convention (Seneca Falls, New York). Stanton writes “The Declaration of Sentiments,” setting out the agenda for decades of woman’s activism.      

• 1849: California’s state constitution becomes the first to extend property rights to women. [Women were denied property rights and making legal contracts in their own right]       

• 1850, 1851: Worcester, Massachusetts, is the site of the first and second National Woman’s Rights Convention, allies with the US Abolitionist Movement; the latter year, at the Woman’s Rights Convention at Akron, Ohio, former slave and suffragette Sojourner Truth delivers her “Ain’t I a woman?” speech.      

• 1852: Clara Howard Nichols presents to the Vermont Senate a major Woman Suffragist issue, women’s property rights. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (aka Life among the Lowly) is published.     

• 1861-1865: Woman Suffragists turn efforts to Civil War effort.    

• 1866: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony form the American Equal Rights Association “dedicated to achieving suffrage for all, regardless of gender or race.”         

• 1868: Woman’s club movement begins in New England; in Vineland, New Jersey, 172 women cast ballots in a separate box during the presidential election. US Senator Samuel Clarke Pomeroy (former New Englander and New Yorker, mayor of Atchison 1858-1859; member of the free State convention at Lawrence 1859, president of relief committee during Kansas famine in 1860 and 1861; after Kansas is admitted into the Union, US April 4, 1861-March 3, 1873) introduces the federal woman’s suffrage amendment in Congress. Under the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified) “citizens” and “voters” are defined, exclusively, as (white) man. 

• 1869: American Equal Rights Association thrown into conflict over the Fourteenth Amendment and proposed Fifteenth Amendment to enfranchise Negro males, and avoid question of Woman Suffrage; ♦Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony establish separate New York-based National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to achieve the vote via US Constitutional Amendment and to push for other woman’s rights issues; ♦Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, et.al establish Boston, Massachusetts-based American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) to press for Woman Suffrage via individual state’s constitutional amendments; ♦Wyoming territory organizes with a Woman Suffrage provision.       

• 1870: Fifteenth Amendment gives Negro men the right to vote, and NWSA refuses to work for its ratification, advocating a Sixteenth Amendment dictating universal suffrage, resulting in Frederick Douglass’s break with Stanton and Anthony.          

• 1871: Victoria Woodhull argues, in a speech before the US House Judiciary Committee, for Woman’s right to vote under the fourteenth amendment.   Anti-Suffrage Party founded. Congressional debates were held over national woman suffrage; “women ‘remonstrants’ organized in opposition” to Woman Suffrage using “traditional rights of petition and remonstrance to influence legislators;”  Almira Lincoln Phelps’s open letter to the New York Times positing that “the feminine ‘silent masses’ opposed woman suffrage, a measure agitated in the regrettably revolutionary tradition of ‘female Thomas Paines.’” “Anti-Suffragism in the United States” by Rebecca A. Rix April 10, 2019 Woman Suffrage series post at National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/anti-suffragism-in-the-united-states.htm     

• 1872: Various women are arrested for illegally voting; Sojourner Truth appears at a polling booth in Battle Creek, Michigan, demanding a ballot to vote, and was denied. ♦ Abigail Scott Duniway convinces Oregon lawmakers to pass laws granting a married woman’s rights, such as starting and operating her own business, controlling the money she earns, and the right to protect her property if her husband leaves.

• 1874: Annie Wittenmyer founds Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) that becomes an important proponent in the fight for Woman Suffrage [one of the strongest opponents to woman’s enfranchisement: the liquor lobby].

• 1876: Frances Willard assumes leadership of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.            

• 1878: Woman Suffrage Amendment is proposed in the US Congress [the 19th Amendment passed 41 years later is worded exactly as this 1878 Amendment.             

• 1887: The first vote on Woman Suffrage is taken in the Senate, and defeated.      

• 1888: National Council of Women in the United States is established to promote advancement of women in society.   

• 1890: Formerly separated NWSA and AWSA merge to form the National American Woman Suffrage; its first president, Cady Stanton, in a movement that focuses on “securing suffrage at the state level.” ♦Wyoming enters the Union with a state constitution granting Woman Suffrage, but the South Dakota campaign loses. ♦American Federation of Labor declares support for woman suffrage.

• 1890-1925 pre- and post-war, Panic of 1893 economic depression, pre-1929-1930s Great Depression aka “The Progressive Era”: Various classes and backgrounds of women enter public life; roles expand, political women increase; Woman Suffrage enters mainstream politics.          

• 1892: Olympia Brown founds the Federal Suffrage Association to campaign for woman’s suffrage.         

• 1893: Colorado adopts woman suffrage.      

• 1894: 600,000 signatures are presented to the New York State Constitutional Convention to bring a Woman Suffrage amendment to the voters, lost      

• 1895: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s publication of The Woman’s Bible drives another wedge among Woman Suffragettes.            

• 1896: Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Frances E.W. Harper among others found the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.♦ Utah joins the Union with full Woman’s Suffrage. ♦Idaho adopts Woman Suffrage.          

• 1903: Women’s Trade Union League of New York, an organization of middle- and working-class women dedicated to working women’s unionization and Woman Suffrage is formed by Mary Dreier, Rheta Childe Dorr, Leonora O'Reilly, and others.

• 1910: Washington State adopts Woman Suffrage. ♦First Suffrage parade is held in New York City organized by rhe Women’s Political Union.       

• 1911: Wealthy, influential women, Catholic clergymen, distillers and brewers, urban political machines, Southern congressmen, and corporate capitalists form the National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS), its leader Mrs. Arthur Dodge.       

• 1912: Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party supports Woman Suffrage, the first time support comes from major political party at the national level. ♦ Twenty thousand suffrage supporters join a New York City suffrage parade. ♦ Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona adopt Woman Suffrage.      

• 1913: Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC is the site of the first major suffrage spectacle organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).

• 1914: Nevada and Montana adopt Woman Suffrage. ♦National Federation of Women’s Clubs (membership of more than two million women throughout the United States) formally endorses the suffrage campaign.   

• 1915: NYC suffrage parade sees a march of 40,000 women dressed in white carrying placards with names of states they represent.          

• 1916: Jeannette Rankin of Montana is the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. ♦ Congressional Union (later known as the National Women’s Party) forms, borrowing strategies from the radical Women’s Social and Political Union of England          

• 1917: Woman Suffrage passes in New York; in Arkansas women are permitted to vote in primary elections. ♦ Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to Congress, is formally seated in the U.S. House of Representatives         

Also in 1917: National Woman’s Party leader is jailed in a mental ward’s solitary confinement “as a way to ‘break’ her will and to undermine her credibility with the public.”            

National Woman’s Party picketers are charged with obstructing sidewalk traffic and sentenced to up to six months in jail; later released unconditionally in response to public outcry and an inability to stop National Woman’s Party picketers’ hunger strike.

• 1918: Representative Rankin opens debate on a Suffrage Amendment in the US House of Representatives. The amendment passes but fails to secure two thirds majority in the Senate. ♦ Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma adopt Woman Suffrage.          

• 1919: The Senate passes the Nineteenth Amendment and the ratification process begins.

• 1920 (August 26): Three quarters of state legislatures ratify the Nineteenth Amendment. Woman (except Negro woman) in America gains full voting rights.        

Women under the Nineteenth Amendment are guaranteed the right to vote in all states of the United States; however, in practice the same restrictions prohibiting “poor or non-white men” from voting; prohibited “poor or non-white women” from voting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States 

National Women’s History Museum 205 S. Whiting Street, Suite 254, Alexandria, Virginia 22304 womenshistory.org

http://www.crusadeforthevote.org/woman-suffrage-timeline-18401920    

OBSERVABLE AGE-old

C

ontempt for Woman

Man pretends the honoring of mothers by means of selling pushing marketable greeting cards and flowers. But what is required to become mother is the subjection of woman to man and the further demand that she produce a man child to further the tradition of contempt for woman.

When the woman made mother fails to emit a male child or no child; or when she doesn’t raise perfect children (with or without a husband, rarely a house helper in the house), she is further castigated and demeaned.

In further denigrating and disempowering woman, man demands not only that she subject herself to him; but having so splayed, he forces her to bring his seed (fit or not, assured a future or not) to fruition.

Except perhaps in worlds of indigenous women (even there where oilmen and other predators  plunder), woman (as also mother) is degraded at every level in virtually every sector of the world, east, west, north, south.

Not every woman becomes or chooses to subject herself to the hood of “MOTHER.”

Even when woman climbs that steep hill to what is, or seems like, success, she is required to make allowances for man (boys will be boys), often subjecting herself in hiding, often suffering unending acts of disrespect by men, and by compromised women, women who are unsteady, for whatever the reasons—insufficient images, education, knowledge, experience, training, innate courage, sound principled character—in their position, and fearful of losing place or position.

Over the years since that momentous revolution of woman, mass media controlled by man have clamped onto labeling Woman Suffrage “women’s” suffrage, which is a deliberate inaccuracy.

W

oman, often misrepresented by men and women, says something entirely different from women.

“WOMAN” asserts an essential, innate, empowered agency of WOMANHOOD.

A

mericans in US Suffragist and Abolitionist movements

1851

Sojourner Truth c.1797-1883

Her strength of character and her feminist message helped bring important attention to both movements: Woman Suffrage and Abolitionist.

Sojourner Truth’s famous speech delivered at the

1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio

“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere.

Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place!

And ain’t I a woman?

Look at me! Look at my arm!

I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!

And ain’t I a woman?

I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well!

And ain’t I a woman?

I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me!

And ain’t I a woman?”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton November 12, 1815 – October 26, 1902

Elizabeth Cady Stanton— her father a slave owner, prominent attorney, Congressman and judge who exposed her to the study of law and other ‘male’ domains early in her life—was an abolitionist, human rights activist, and one of the first leaders of the woman’s rights movement.

In 1848—with Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, Mary Ann M’Clintock and Martha Coffin Wright—she helped organize the First Woman’s Rights Convention, the Seneca Falls Convention.

The Declaration of Sentiments Stanton helped write offered examples of how men oppressed, e.g.,  

    preventing them from owning land or earning wages

    preventing them from voting

    compelling them to submit to laws created without their representation

    giving men authority in divorce and child custody proceedings and decisions

    preventing them from gaining a college education

    preventing them from participating in most public church affairs

    subjecting them to a different moral code than men

    aiming to make them dependent and submissive to men

Carrie Chapman Catt January 9, 1859 – March 9, 1947

Carrie Chapman Catt worked as a teacher to pay her own way through Iowa State College. She worked in the school system and for newspapers before joining suffrage movement in 1887. She took over the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900 and came up with the “Winning Plan” that helped pass the 19th Amendment in 1920.

In her formative years, when her father had refused to fund her college work, she worked as a teacher to raise the money to attend Iowa State College. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1880. The next year, she became a high school principal in Iowa. Moving quickly up the career ladder, she served as the superintendent of schools in Mason City, Iowa, only two years later.

Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, investigative journalist, educator, Suffragist, civil rights leader

July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931

1913 Woman Suffrage Demonstration

A rowdy, mostly-male crowd watching the Woman Suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, pressed in on the demonstration, at times leaving barely enough room for the marchers to get by.

“Many women were verbally and physically assaulted while the police stood by either unwilling or unable to control the crowd.”

National Women’s Party leader Alice Paul “attempted to exclude black women from participating” in the Washington, DC parade.

Members of the National American Woman Suffrage Association had to force Paul to allow Negro women to join the procession.

“Some women of color – such as civil rights crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett and lawyer Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians—bucked the attempt to racially segregate the parade.”

“Many American Negro suffragists were segregated. But not all”

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a fearless journalist, anti-lynching crusader, and founder of the Alpha Suffrage Club for African-American women, “marched with her state contingent from Illinois, despite some of them endorsing the parade’s official segregated stance.”

When the women began marching, Ida B. Wells was nowhere to be seen—but then suddenly appeared out of the crowd to ‘calmly’ take her place with the Illinois delegation. Two white suffragists, Belle Squire and Virginia Brooks, took positions on each side of her. Wells-Barnett “marched proudly with the … head Ladies of the Illinois delegation.” 

The journalist reportedly believed that women’s organizations were the “new power, the new molder of public sentiment, to accomplish the reforms that the pulpit and the law [had] failed to accomplish.”

T

his year a hundred years gone (180 years of struggle) had dawned a prospect and promise—despite all the conflict, divisiveness, stumbling, and antis on all sides—of the liberation of  woman.  

Sources

“Woman Suffrage and the 19th Amendment” https://www.womenshistory.org/resources/general/woman-suffrage-movement

Beginning in the mid-19th century, several generations of woman suffrage supporters lectured, wrote, marched, lobbied, and practiced civil disobedience to achieve what many Americans considered a radical change in the Constitution – guaranteeing women the right to vote. Some suffragists used more confrontational tactics such as picketing, silent vigils, and hunger strikes.

https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/woman-suffrage

“Women Marching in Suffrage Parade in Washington, DC March 3, 1913”

https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/marching-suffrage-parade-dc

“Flag Bearer for Women's Rights Standing Near White House”

January 30, 1917 https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/flag-bearer-womens-rights

https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation-1890-1915/new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/ida-b-wells-barnett-holds-her-ground/

Carrie Chapman Catt https://www.biography.com/political-figure/carrie-chapman-catt

Ida B. Wells https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation-1890-1915/new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/ida-b-wells-barnett-holds-her-ground/

“A Noble Endeavor: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Suffrage: ‘With no sacredness of the ballot, there can be no sacredness of human life itself” Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931)” Woman Suffrage Centennial Commission

https://www.womensvote100.org/the-suff-buffs-blog/2020/4/1/a-noble-endeavor-ida-b-wells-barnett-and-suffrage

On March 3, 1913, the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was in a Washington, D.C. drill rehearsal hall with sixty-four other Illinois suffragists. She was there representing the Alpha Suffrage Club (ASC)—which she had founded as the first black suffrage club in Chicago just two months before. Ida planned to march with the women in what promised to be a parade of unprecedented scale and significance. Organized by the young suffragist Alice Paul and the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), thousands of suffragists from across the country would descend on the Capitol along with nine bands, four mounted brigades, twenty floats and an allegorical enactment on the steps of the Treasury Department.

https://www.womensvote100.org/the-suff-buffs-blog/2020/4/1/a-noble-endeavor-ida-b-wells-barnett-and-suffrage

“Sojourner Truth Truth” circa 1797-1883 Alice Janigro, https://suffrage100ma.org/sojourner-truth/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_American_Woman_Suffrage_Association

“Anti-Suffragism in the United States” Rebecca A. Rix April 10, 2019 Woman Suffrage series post at National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/articles/anti-suffragism-in-the-united-states.htm

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_rights_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Chapman_Catt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cady_Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton History.com November 9, 2009, editors https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/elizabeth-cady-stanton

The Declaration of Sentiments (Declaration of Rights and Sentiments):

a document signed in 1848 by 68 women and 32 men—100 out of some 300 attendees at the first women's rights convention to be organized by women.

Held in Seneca Falls, New York, the convention is now known as the Seneca Falls Convention.

Principal author of the Declaration: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who modeled it upon the United States Declaration of Independence. She was a key organizer of the convention along with Lucretia Coffin Mott, and Martha Coffin Wright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Sentiments

“Twenty Facts About Woman Suffrage” a blog entry” posted September 25, 2017, by Kelly Boyce List appeared in September 1911 issue of the Western Woman Voter, a newspaper published in Seattle, Washington.

Accessible Archive: Women’s Suffrage Collection. https://www.accessible-archives.com/2017/09/twenty-facts-woman-suffrage/

1. Half a million women in the United States have full political rights.

2. In five states of the Union, Washington, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah, women vote for President, Vice-President, Congressmen and all state, county and city officials.

3. Utah a suffrage state has the largest proportion of home owners of any state in the Union.

4. In Denver the women cast 55 per cent of the vote in the large residence wards, and only 4 per cent in the “slum” wards.

 5. Women are only 42 per cent of the population of Colorado, but they cast 45 per cent of the vote.

 6. In New Zealand, at the first election (1893), 78 per cent of the women voted and 69 per cent of the men. (The women less frequently “lose their vote” by being away from home.)

 7. At later elections in New Zealand the vote of the men steadily rose. In 1905 (latest available report) 80 per cent of the men and 80 per cent of the women voted.

 8. In most states of the Union about 60 or 65 per cent of the men vote.

 9. In Wyoming 90 per cent of the women vote.

 10. In Colorado 80 per cent of the women register and 72 per cent vote.

 11. In Idaho women cast 40 per cent of the vote, though they are in the minority.

 12. In Colorado, in the first eight months after women were enfranchised, more books on political economy and civics were sold than in the whole twenty years before.

 13. In Seattle there were never a hundred women devoting themselves to the suffrage campaign, but 23,000 women registered at the first election.

 14. Eighty per cent of the women voting in Seattle this year were married women the women of the “home.”

 15. In Wyoming and Idaho a larger percentage of women are married than in any other states of the Union.

 16. Where women have voted the longest, divorce is only one-eighth as great as in similar states where they do not vote.

 17. In New Zealand divorce has decreased 77 per cent and crime has decreased 55 per cent since women began to vote.

 18. There is no nation, no state, no city, where women vote where the vote of the undesirable women even remotely approaches that of the women of good repute.

 19. Almost 30,000 women voted at the last election in Denver. Of these, only 400 could be connected with any bad element.

 20. In letters presented to the Chicago Charter Convention in October, 1906, the 140 mayors of the five states where women at that time voted in city elections (Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Kansas) were unanimous in agreeing, first, that the women of those states do vote in large numbers (in many places 90 to 95 per cent); second, that the women are public spirited and take an intelligent interest in political affairs; third, that the vote of the “undesirable women” is an insignificant factor.

Insight Beyond Today’s News, CLB - © All Rights Reserved