This is a simple remembrance of a momentous event. August 26, 2020, is the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, at last. It took so long, so many years of struggle, to get that basic right, just like it's taken generations to pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and to elect a woman president. As pioneering women's historian Gerda Lerner put it, "Nobody gave us anything." Women have had to fight for every right achieved. They still do.
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| Suffrage campaign 1917 and Women's March, Washington, DC, 100 years later in January 2017 |
From 1848 to 1920, women struggled at the state and national levels to win that right.
The work it took to convince men to give women the vote was grueling. It was made harder in 1868, when the word "male" was put into the US Constitution for the first time. The 14th Amendment, one of the post-Civil War "freedom" amendments," gave recently freed slaves the right to vote. A noble amendment.
The work it took to convince men to give women the vote was grueling. It was made harder in 1868, when the word "male" was put into the US Constitution for the first time. The 14th Amendment, one of the post-Civil War "freedom" amendments," gave recently freed slaves the right to vote. A noble amendment.
The framers, however, wanted to make sure that black women were NOT included in the right to vote because it would also enfranchise white women. They added the word "male" to the amendment to make themselves clear.
It was all too clear to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who became the master strategist of the 19th-century women's movement. They were beside themselves. They saw that adoption of the 14th amendment would require another constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote in federal elections.
"An appalling vista of herculean labor opened up before the women leaders," historian Eleanor Flexner pointed out in Century of Struggle. Stanton, whose acumen was razor sharp, always ahead of her time, thought woman suffrage would be set back a century. She wasn't far wrong. "It was the Negro's Hour," long-time abolitionists like Mott, Lucy Stone, and Angelina Grimke proclaimed. Women would have to wait.
The women's movement split over the 14th amendment. The American Women's Rights Association focused on state-by-state changes. The National Women's Rights Association, led by Stanton and Anthony, focused on a federal amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The leaders of the two factions created an array of new tactics to move forward on securing the right to vote. These included public advocacy campaigns; legal challenges; grassroots organizing; women's protests and parades; pickets in front of the White House; innovative tactics to lobby elected officials at the local, state and national levels. Such tactics, pioneered by women, were later adopted by the Civil Rights movement.
When the women's movement reunited in 1890, all tactics were on the table and a new energy infused the movement.
After the death of women's rights stalwart Susan B. Anthony, who had devoted her entire life to the cause, a young Carrie Catt became head of the reunified movement, the National American Women's Suffrage Association. A new generation of college-educated women, women professionals and women workers came onto the scene with renewed commitment to suffrage and new arguments to make their case. Carrie Catt was one of them, a driving force into the 20th century.
Catt developed a five-year "Winning Plan" that she implemented like a general leading an army into battle. She headed teams of suffrage workers in the field, organized in every state, and demanded clear focus on the shared goal of women suffrage, on the tactics and timeline, on detailed action steps. It was a monumental effort.
After the vote was finally won and ratified by the states, an exhausted but exhilarated Carrrie Catt recalled what it took to claim the victory.
To get the word "male" out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign....During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into their constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses. (quoted in Flexner).
In an afterword to the 1996 edition of Flexner's Century of Struggle, historian Ellen Fitzpatrick called the struggle for women's voting rights "one of the longest, most successful and in some respects the most radical challenges ever posed to the American system of electoral politics."
The 20th amendment, she said, had helped secure political rights denied women since the dawn of the Republic. "The suffrage movement remains a vital reminder of what was achieved when those who were denied political power organized a campaign to capture the instruments of democracy. The courage, fortitude and determination of millions of participants stand as an enduring testament to the significance of the suffrage movement to modern American history."
Yes. And still. Still. There was so much more work to do, more rights to achieve. A young Alice Paul took on the campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, and Margaret Sanger for birth control, and it's still not over. In the realm of equality for women, 50 percent of the population, women's work is never done.It helps to remember the women pioneers, on whose shoulders we stand, on whose shoulders we persist.
Some sources:
* Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (first published 1959; several editions thereafter).
Flexner was one of the first researchers to delve into women's primary documents, including those at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the Spingarn Collection of African American History, created by Dorothy Porter at Howard University, Washington, DC; and the Schomburg Collection at the NY Public Library. I was fascinated by Flexner's footnotes.
* Wikipedia, the 19th Amendment.
I required the students in my Women's History classes to read the whole Seneca Falls Declaration and we would go around and read each section out loud. It is that important, and still worth the read. The Women's Declaration of Independence is a pioneering document modeled on Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.
* Mary Walton, A Woman's Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot (2015). Paul got the Equal Rights Amendment introduced into Congress in 1923. It is still not ratified.
Movements for change are always complicated, and race, gender, ethnicity, class compound the complexity. There are personal histories that speak to us as individuals and there is a common narrative we all share. It is still being written. We need to take it all in, and strive for that common narrative that is inclusive, universal, and transcendent. Our history is a work in progress.
This is a wonderful short story by Dorothy Burhman [DC Diamondopolous] of the importance of the vote to an Irish immigrant woman who knew what the right to vote meant for working women."100 years ago, women cast their first ballot to vote in the United States. Never in my lifetime, has our vote meant so much. "1920" is now live on Project Agent Orange. "1920" is the story of so many suffragettes who fought and died for the right to vote. This flash fiction will be published in Nov. by the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, 'So It Goes' their yearly anthology. It will be my 3rd year in a row to have a story published by the Vonnegut, a wonderful honor. - “1920” is the story of a young Irish immigrant who puts her life on the line for the right to vote. You can read this short 4 minute read now. Thank you Micheal Brownstein for publishing. Below is the link. https://projectagentorange.wordpress.com."
(I'm not sure how to make these links work in the new google blog format. You'll have to copy the link and paste into your browser to open the link. Thanks.)
