History’s documents “Woman” Suffrage
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
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.
oman, often misrepresented
by men and women, says something entirely different from women.
“WOMAN”
asserts an essential, innate, empowered agency of WOMANHOOD.
