The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  It was a modest act of collegiality across the color line—you could even call it pathetic. Regardless of Anthony’s timidity in our eyes, though, the gesture would have sat badly with her New Orleans hostesses, because it violated the unwritten Southern prohibition of interracial contact outside the mistress-servant relationship. The significance of Anthony’s visit wasn’t lost on the black women, who responded with requisite phrases of deference. “When women like you, Miss Anthony, come to see us and speak to us it helps us believe in the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of Man, and at least for the time being in the sympathy of women.” At least for the time being: The African-American suffragists allowed themselves that one dig. And Sylvanie Williams, club president, did not leave matters at that. She wrote to NAWSA’s Woman’s Journal afterward, protesting the injustice the Jim Crow convention had done to “10,000 intelligent colored women.”24

  The question of how a once-proud democratic movement ended up warbling “Dixie” in New Orleans has to be understood in the broader context of disenfranchisement campaigns. NAWSA was latching on to a trend across a wide swath of American opinion, from Northern conservatives to liberal reformers. The tragedy was not that suffrage was uniquely racist, as Ellen Carol DuBois has put it, but that “the women’s suffrage movement, which had begun in the visionary, perfectionist years of the mid-nineteenth century, dragged on into the early twentieth, into the very nadir of American race relations.”25

  Disenfranchisement reasoning pushed middle-class black women into a corner, which they tried to escape by using the legitimacy conferred by educated suffrage, fashioning themselves as redeemers of ignorant men’s misused votes. By the 1890s, Southern reactionaries had succeeded in so maligning and distorting the history of Reconstruction that champions of the race had difficulty breaking through reigning depictions of tragic Negro domination, rife with vice and corruption, that supposedly followed the war. Black men were said to have sold their votes to the highest bidder—so went the story of the postwar South, as whites told it. White men redeemed state governments sodden with black iniquity.

  Seeking a foothold in suffrage discussions, African-American women adapted condemnations of “vote-selling” for their own purposes—departing from the narrative promoted by male leaders, who depicted black men as loyal citizens thwarted and vilified by racist whites. Women declared that they, unlike men, would use the vote for noble purposes. “You do not find the colored woman selling her birthright for a mess of pottage,” scoffed Anna Julia Cooper. “The Negro woman needs to get back by the wise use of it, what the Negro man has lost by the misuse of it,” maintained Nannie Burroughs, a Baptist leader. However equivocal the approach now seems, educated suffrage held out the hope that middle-class blacks could hold on to some vestige of power by allying themselves with whites against the ignorant masses. Women made the case that they deserved their fair share of it. “Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance,” professed Mary Church Terrell in this vein in an 1898 speech before NAWSA.26

  Mostly, however, disenfranchisement energies in the early twentieth century encouraged white women to see themselves as presiding from their Anglo-Saxon pinnacle over social and racial inferiors. Xenophobic, racist language that shocked reformers when Stanton and Anthony used it after the war turned into standard NAWSA rhetoric. Suffragists routinely deprecated the ignorant foreign vote and bewailed the humiliation of being ruled by degraded men. In Germany, German men governed German women; in France, French men did the same, “but in this country, American women are governed by every kind of man under the light of the sun,” complained Anna Howard Shaw, successor to Anthony as NAWSA president, at the 1914 convention—praise that was weirdly blind to the fact that Germany and France were about to descend into the maelstrom of World War I. “There is no race, there is no color, there is no nationality of men who are not the sovereign rulers of American women,” she added. Carrie Chapman Catt, the no-nonsense leader who took over in 1915, used language indistinguishable from that of Southern whites, lamenting Reconstruction’s government by “illiterate men, fresh from slavery.” Black women were NAWSA’s absolutely dependable supporters, but for their own reasons, and no thanks to white women.27

  Conservative domination of the movement did not, however, serve it well. While the imagined face-off between high-minded women and coarse, debauched immigrants and blacks catered to the prejudices of the day, there were no victories and over time the ranks dwindled. The Southern strategy fizzled: Southern Democrats were quite able to shore up white supremacy without any help from women.28 In 1903, the year of the New Orleans meeting, NAWSA had nine thousand members and a strapped treasury. In contrast, the main British suffrage organization, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), established in 1897, had about the same number of members in a much smaller population. American women’s suffrage lacked the animated debates, tactical flexibility, and alliances to push, prod, or pull itself out of the doldrums, as the period came to be called. The politics of the mothers, permeated with disdain for the foreign lesser stock and crude “Africans,” was supposed to be a big tent, but the crowd inside was sparse.

  Suffrage restrictions on men only made women’s disenfranchisement look more, not less, logical and sensible. Antisuffragists drew strength politically and ideologically from other disenfranchisers. Members of the leading Northern “anti” group, for example, came from the same social set and in some cases the same families as the statesmen, blue-bloods, businessmen, and Harvard professors of the influential Boston-based Immigration Restriction League. This meant that in the first decade of the century, the antisuffragists held their ground and then some. Their platform was virtual representation: Antis repeated what defenders of the male franchise had been saying for more than a hundred years. “Faithful to the doctrine of the old Bible and true to the teachings of the new, our fathers founded this Government upon the family as the unit of political power,” declared an Alabama congressman in 1915, “with the husband as the recognized and responsible head.” (Actually, about the Founding Fathers he was correct.)29

  While few in number, antis’ wealth and connections gave them access to the press and local elites. Men dominated the movement, but eminent women also spoke out. Antis shifted ground, depending on the audience, with appeals that exploited several kinds of conservative beliefs about women’s proper relationship to men and the body politic. They correctly saw the democratizing tendency that votes for women represented, and warned businessmen that suffrage would strengthen the labor and reform vote. But they also tailored their message to nonelite audiences when the occasion warranted. With saloonkeepers, brewers, and workingmen who liked their liquor, they warned that suffrage would bring prohibition. Where there were Catholic immigrants, they allied with the Church hierarchy; where there were nativists, they inveighed against foreign influence.

  Sometimes the antis depicted women as upright moral arbiters, to be protected from the hurly-burly of electioneering, sometimes as dupes of their husbands, incapable of making their own decisions about candidates: Disenfranchisement was a protection for the country, as it was with ignorant blacks and immigrants, since it prevented demagogues from gaining control of foolish females who acted as shills for Democratic machine pols or Mormon polygamists.30 Sometimes they posed disenfranchisement as an elixir of femininity that made women deferential and desirable. Virtual representation heightened sexual chemistry, and, conversely, eros would fizzle if women got the vote. The suffrage question “was making women less attractive to men,” warned an Ohio representative in a 1915 congressional debate about the suffrage amendment.31

  Mostly, however, the antis managed to avoid any disparaging suggestions that women’s deficits were the reason they should not vote. In this respect they adjusted to feminist gains over the preceding fifty years. Antifeminism proved tenacious, as it often has, because proponents were shrewd enough to ce
de ground and reorganize their assault. The spread of women’s higher education and their array of civic roles weakened the older anti position that women lacked the capacities to reason. So in the new century, the antis regrouped: “No question of superiority or equality is involved in the opposition to votes for women,” Annie Nathan Meyer, a wealthy philanthropist and vocal anti, assured followers.32 Instead, women’s exclusion was a privilege. Electoral politics were dirty, distasteful work that men shouldered because they wanted to protect pure women. Women could do good, but party politics, with its corrupt deals and pandering to squalid self-interest, weakened the virtues of equanimity and moral understanding that made them valuable to their country. Men must protect women’s freedom to stay clear.

  The antis had considerable success. After the last state victory, in Idaho in 1896, the suffrage movement ground to a halt. There was little to show for the years of unified efforts and kowtowing to the Southerners. The federal amendment languished in congressional committee. Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt froze out NAWSA. As for the states, measure after measure went down in defeat. The numbers were depressing: 480 campaigns over fifty years to get legislatures to submit amendments to voters, forty-seven to get state constitutional conventions to include suffrage, and so forth. Although the numbers inflated the actual efforts invested—many campaigns involved only two or three women working the state—they were still dispiriting.33

  Harriot Stanton Blatch, younger daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, returned to the United States in 1900 after twenty years in England working in the flourishing suffrage movement there. The inertia dismayed her. “Friends, drummed up and harried by the ardent, listlessly heard the same old arguments. Unswerving adherence to the cause was held in high esteem, but alas, it was loyalty to a rut worn deep and ever deeper.” Aging suffragists admitted in private that they had no purchase on a wider public: It was not the antisuffragists who were their greatest obstacle, but American women’s apathy. “They have thought very little about it,” Anna Howard Shaw confided to a European compatriot.34

  Suffragism nestled in a corner of political culture where idealism presented itself as disenfranchisement. It harbored women whose political abilities were calcified and whose understanding of democracy was crippled by an overweening sense of their own superiority. Like many good ideas that had been around too long, women’s suffrage was irritating to everyone but the faithful, boring yet elusive.

  Internationally, asking for the vote was common by 1900, a marker of modern women’s aspirations. Steamships and railroads hauled women’s rights ideas and enthusiasts around the world; newspapers and books trekked across borders. In the British Empire, continental Europe, China and Japan, and parts of the Middle East, the ideas touched the middle classes and modernizing elites. Europeans and Americans, invested in the prospects of a global movement with themselves at its head, believed that women, in all their national variations, were a constituency recognizable to one another, a political bloc that might play a part in international diplomacy: a collective Woman of the Twentieth Century to follow the Woman of the Nineteenth.35

  By 1900, women in Scandinavia, Iceland, and virtually all the countries of northern and central Europe and several outposts of the British Empire had called for the vote. The International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA), formed in 1904, brought together suffragists from some two dozen North Atlantic countries.36 Over time, Europeans and Americans became friends, mulling over tactics in letters, visiting, traveling together, and attending international conferences. Mutually congratulatory leaders praised their transnational sisterhood, which on paper seemed close to the international proletariat socialists claimed as their world-transforming force. The imagined affiliations across national borders sparked a sense of extravagant likeness across divides of country, language, and even faith.

  Yet the reality belied these paeans to progress. Across Europe (with the exception of Scandinavia), suffrage movements were blocked, weak, or politically impotent—not unlike in the United States. Each country had its own reasons, story, and cast of characters, but some patterns are clear.

  First, the issue could not make headway where the male franchise was sharply delimited. It is difficult now to appreciate how unusual it was before World War I for European men to vote or, alternatively, have their votes count. In the United States, universal male suffrage was at least nominal, guaranteed by the Constitution, although in practice disenfranchisement campaigns drastically eroded voting rights. But in Europe, the very idea had yet to succeed. Universal male suffrage only existed in France. Enfranchised populations were small, in some countries minuscule. In Belgium, until a general strike in 1893 forced reform, less than a tenth of adult men could vote. In England, the second most democratic nation in Europe, only 60 percent of adult men voted, and this was after two reform bills had extended the franchise.37

  Second, the left/liberal formations in which women’s suffrage movements originated were in retreat. Everywhere in Europe in the late nineteenth century, liberals lost support and momentum to workers’, peasants’, and right-wing nationalist parties. As for the left, the socialist parties had an on-again, off-again relationship to feminist organizing, their sympathy for women’s rights undercut by a left-wing version of patriarchy (honest workingmen supporting virtuous wives at home) and fear that suffrage would take proletarian women away from the class struggle. Socialist women in Germany, Austria, and France had to grope their way through comrades’ condemnation of the bourgeois women’s movement, finding a way between class solidarity and their own sense that all classes of women shared certain problems.38

  Third, in the autocratic regimes of Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, women’s rights ran up against insuperable obstacles. Civil rights, including a free press and free assembly, were weak or nonexistent. Austria banned women from joining political organizations in 1867, so no female suffrage society existed. Suffragists linked up with nationalist forces in Bohemia and Hungary but gained nothing from the partnership. In Russia, the intelligentsia had ruminated on the woman question since the 1860s. But in the absence of representative government there was no ground for a movement to develop. At first separately and then in unison, female factory workers and women of the liberal and left parties broached female enfranchisement during the Revolution of 1905, but the ascendant liberals shunted women aside, and the electorate that resulted from the czar’s concessions was male. Infuriated, women organized, but as the czar undermined liberal gains, those organizations collapsed. In 1908, the main feminist organization counted only 1,000 members, down from 12,000 the year before.39

  Finally, in countries dominated by Catholics, suffragists ran up against opposition from both left and right. Republican France was fiercely anticlerical, and liberals and socialists alike believed that women were ineluctably entangled with the superstitions and antidemocratic traditions of the Church: dupes of the priests and the pope. Conservatives, braced by Catholic tradition, thought women had no place in the polity. In Belgium and Italy, the same convergence proved lethal; in Spain, women’s rights had no purchase whatsoever.40

  It was in Scandinavia that women’s suffrage had the greatest success. Although these countries were small and marginal to Euro-American affairs, their women’s movements came to serve as advertisements for dreams come true. A combination of Protestant sensibility, middle-class political vigor, and successful independence struggles carried on by liberals and radicals resulted in wide tolerance for women’s rights. In Finland, the 1906 breakthrough came because suffragists were part of a left-liberal coalition that brought about independence from Russian rule. In Norway the same pattern held: Independence from Sweden brought votes for women in 1913. Tiny Iceland in the early 1900s provides the touching example of a population of 50,000 people producing 12,000 signatures on a petition for women suffrage. In Sweden and Denmark, both sovereign states, prolonged struggles against intransigent aristocracies strengthened the liberal politics that gave women’s s
uffrage sway. Old regime forces kept suffrage blocked in both countries until after World War I, but women’s rights ideas resonated in the populations.

  Typically, suffragists were either affiliated with political parties or members of small, free-floating circles of advanced women. The large single-issue mass movements of Britain and the United States were the exception, not the rule. At the turn of the century, British suffragists commanded a robust movement, situated at the center of a far-flung empire with influence over feminist thinking worldwide. Their problem was that at home, a long dependence on the Liberal Party had come to nothing. In 1886, Liberals followed the general European trend of decline and lost their parliamentary majority, to remain out of power for twenty years except for a brief interregnum. In 1900, the NUWSS counted some ten thousand members and a hundred active local societies, which more than quadrupled in the next decade. But, as a veteran campaigner complained, the petitions, meetings, and demonstrations were to no avail: “All melt off Parliament like snow-flakes.”41

  Unlike the Americans, the British movement, while predominantly middle-class, also included workingwomen. An energetic labor contingent centered in the factory districts of the north carried on an association between women’s rights and labor that went back to the Owenites.42 The issue facing the British was whether to go for the final goal or a way station: a bill that enfranchised women property owners (meaning widows and single women)—the moderate measure—or one that called for full enfranchisement, which would mean challenging coverture. The latter tack, because it inevitably involved universal suffrage, was a proposition that in Britain—with its long attachment to the propertied franchise—smacked of dangerous radicalism. Moreover, coverture in Britain was much stronger than in the United States, where state statutes had whittled away the family jurisdiction over the years.43