The Feminist Promise

by Christine Stansell

  The escape from decorous womanhood took on a matrophobic edge. Young women wanted feminism to spring them loose from the encumbrances of the pure, morally superior, self-sacrificing nineteenth-century “angel in the house,” as Virginia Woolf, who was young herself in these years, later encapsulated the idea, her tenderness mingled with something akin to scorn and something else not unlike fear. “She was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others.” Woolf wrote about her own beloved and long-suffering mother, but also about the pall an entire generation of self-denying and soul-stifling late Victorian women cast over their daughters. “It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her,” announced Woolf of the metaphorical struggle of a younger self. Hostility toward fathers expressed itself in general criticisms of patriarchy, but feelings about mothers were personal and cutting. “Am I the Christian gentlewoman my mother slaved to make me?” bragged Genevieve Taggard, a poet and renegade from a missionary family. “No indeed.”38

  Feminism meant headlong flight from your mother’s life. Older suffragists’ appeal to tradition and obligation had little purchase among young women who saw themselves as inhabiting a century that could be lived only on its unique terms. Moreover, with such a pitiable record of success to show for the old guard’s long struggle, it was unclear exactly what they had to teach. In the American movement, the older generation came up against unruly daughters who refused to be put in their place.

  In the heady aftermath of the Western victories, two Americans who had been in England returned to the United States and joined NAWSA. Alice Paul was a Swarthmore graduate who had followed the well-trodden path from college idealism to settlement house work in London, where she fell in with the WSPU. Lucy Burns was working at Oxford University on a doctorate in history when she, too, joined. Both went the distance with the Pankhursts, to prison and on hunger strikes. Returning to the United States in 1911, they brought with them the WSPU creed of sensational action and (it turned out) going to jail. In Washington, D.C., they volunteered their services to NAWSA. Their special fiefdom was to be congressional work, an aspect of pushing for the federal amendment that lay quiescent. There was not even a NAWSA office in Washington, and the women’s suffrage amendment had not made it out of congressional committee since 1896.

  It was a propitious moment. In the 1912 presidential election, the Socialist Eugene Debs won a million votes and Theodore Roosevelt, running on the Progressive ticket, split the Republican vote, thereby handing victory to Woodrow Wilson and ending the Republicans’ sixteen-year lock on the presidency. Southern Democrats greeted Wilson’s win as a coup (Wilson was a Virginian) but the strength of the Socialists and Progressives showed there were left-liberal forces with which he would have to contend. With Republican hegemony gone, there were party rivalries to be exploited, but suffragists were so untutored in Washington politics that no one initially grasped that fact.

  The gap in NAWSA leadership in the capital allowed Paul and Burns, two outsiders, to take over operations and in a short time wield inordinate influence. With a devotion so total it bordered on maniacal, they set about inserting women’s suffrage into the excitement around the new administration, organizing a suffrage parade for the day preceding Wilson’s inaugration. Five thousand marched, many in the requisite white dresses, including a contingent of African-Americans—a striking presence in a segregated Southern city. When the black women informed the organizers they were coming, they were told to march in the rear, but after protests poured in, NAWSA gave them a spot in the regular order. The parade was a huge success.39

  Burns and Paul were shrewd enough to see the benefits of trolling the backwaters of Washington politics. They gathered around them a group of Washington insiders: political wives and daughters and female bureaucrats (women could not vote, but they could work in government). In less than two years they had enough strength to break out on their own, having offended Catt and NAWSA stalwarts with their brashness. “We have been having a pretty hard time with a lot of young women here who got their training under Mrs Pankhurst,” Anna Howard Shaw confided to her Dutch friend Aletta Jacobs. Clashing generational styles, Old Guard versus Young Turks, militants versus moderates, mothers offended by heedless daughters: All these resentments converged. “They are all old members in this convention,” wrote Margaret Hinchey to WTUL organizer Leonora O’Reilly of her appearance before NAWSA. “All the young people is gone over to the Congressial [Congressional] Union.” From the NAWSA viewpoint, Shaw assessed the damage:

  I think by their unwisdom they have put us back ten years in Congress. It is pretty hard to work for years and years to bring the cause up to a point where it has some chance of going through and then have a lot of young things who never did any thing to build up the cause, attempt to run things their way being responsible to any one.40

  In 1914, seven state referenda were in play and the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU)—the breakaway group Burns and Paul founded—pulled in volunteers, many with the means and willingness to travel. Women with a penchant for unconventional behavior attached themselves to the CU: Greenwich Village bohemians, for example, were a sizable contingent. Feminists with ties to labor tended to gravitate toward Paul’s faction because the CU was interested in issues of equal pay for equal work, while NAWSA was indifferent. But beyond this core type, CU membership was as varied as the larger movement. Among those arrested in Washington in 1917 when the CU picketed the White House were matrons and grandmothers from old WASP families, rebellious heiresses, government workers, politicians’ wives, immigrant factory workers, a golf champion, teachers, nurses, artists, college students, journalists, and university professors. At least one historic presence graced the picket line: Olympia Brown, frail, petite, and in her eighties, was a Universalist minister who had traveled with Stanton and Anthony in the Kansas campaign and worked with Stanton on The Woman’s Bible.41 In those states in play, ordinary workers moved between the CU and NAWSA, oblivious to acrimony in the inner circles. After the burst of victories in 1910–12, wins did not come easily. Blocked by antis, liquor interests, and manufacturers fearful that women voters would strengthen labor laws, more than two thirds of the referenda went down to defeat.42

  The dynamics of a federal political system, where state successes gave leverage at the national level, drove an upsurge. By 1916 there were some four million women’s votes in play.43 This meant that in Congress, supporting suffrage was no longer an automatic liability. The CU renamed itself the National Woman’s Party (NWP) to signal an alliance of women voters. Congressmen and senators from the suffrage states recognized the importance of the new voters at a moment when margins of electoral victories were thin. Congressional support for the federal amendment rose incrementally with each state added to the column.

  President Wilson was on record as disliking “unsexed, masculine females.” But personal predilections were one matter, political calculations another. In 1915, he stated his personal support for the issue, but refused to put political muscle behind it. He was caught in his own party between two antisuffrage blocs: Southern Democrats and the urban political machines, whose opposition came from city Democrats’ convictions that voting women equaled Republican women and temperance-favoring, antisaloon women. But once workingwomen got involved and the association between suffrage and middle-class prudishness dissipated, the urban machines did an about-face in the 1916 election and either endorsed suffrage or espoused neutrality. Wilson was freed up to maneuver around the diehard Southern Democrats.44

  Success in a few states, however, would not have amounted to much had not suffragists been such quick studies in pressure politics. Both the NWP and NAWSA set up full-time lobbying offices. They sacked the old methods of polite feminine persuasion and prowled the halls of Congress calling politicians to account. They kept meticulous notes on voting records, tracked the machinations of com
mittee hearings, and lurked outside chambers and offices to buttonhole congressmen. “For three years every politician in Washington has been followed by a relentless feminine shadow,” chuckled a writer in a women’s magazine. Politicians’ wives and daughters and Washington socialites wooed leading men. “Not only did we know each man’s mind minutely from day to day, but we had their constituents on guard at home,” boasted Maud Younger, who came to Washington to work for the NWP. They abided by feminine good manners. NAWSA instructed workers to avoid nagging or anger, and warned them not to stay too long. Nonetheless, they were relentless and politicians paid attention. “I’m with you; I’m for it; I’m going to vote for it,” expostulated New York congressman Fiorello La Guardia when cornered. “Now don’t bother me!”45

  Wilson’s 1916 reelection campaign was hard fought and close. The NWP made the gamble to oppose Democrats, every Democrat, even those who supported the cause—copying the WSPU tactic of holding the party in power responsible for the absence of suffrage. But intensifying debate over American intervention in World War I pushed women’s suffrage to the margins of public attention. The strategy flopped. In fact, women voters were critical to Wilson’s victory.

  Something was needed to push the issue onto the front page. The NWP’s mastery of the arts of spectacle led leaders to the insight—apparently no one else had ever had it—that they could use the sidewalk in front of the White House as a stage for protest. In January 1917, demonstrators gathered outside the iron fence on Pennsylvania Avenue. The well-dressed platoon stood as silent witnesses to the president’s inaction. They came every day, a shifting collection of Washington stalwarts and pilgrims from out of town.

  At first the demonstration was decorous. The women remained silent, hoisting signs with versions of their standard rhetorical question:

  MR. PRESIDENT! HOW LONG MÜST WÜMEN WAIT FÜR LIBERTY?

  The president nodded cordially, a gentleman to the ladies, when he passed in his limousine; and one cold day he invited them to tea (they declined). The crowds were generally friendly and treated the pickets as a curiosity. But once the United States entered the war, the mood darkened. The NWP resolved to continue their campaign regardless. In June 1917, when envoys from the Kerensky government in Russia paid a call on Wilson, demonstrators unfurled a wordy banner denouncing the president and Secretary of State Elihu Root and urging the Russians to forgo an alliance with the United States.

  PRESIDENT WILSON AND ENVOY ROOT ARE DECEIVING RUSSIA.

  The episode had no effect on diplomatic negotiations, but it ended the president’s willingness to tolerate them on his doorstep. Already engaged in stamping out antiwar dissent on the left, he apparently gave the go-ahead to shut down the demonstration. The D.C. police descended to throw picketers into paddy wagons and haul them off to jail. The next day, more women took the places of those arrested, and the police returned, and thus began a drama that lasted five months: picketers, police, arrests, paddy wagons, prisoners, leading to more picketers, police, arrests, etc.46

  Thrown into the D.C. workhouse, the demonstrators—some two hundred were eventually arrested—endured abominable conditions (disgusting food, humiliating uniforms, manhandling by guards) that were the accustomed lot of the black women who were the usual residents. The prisoners ranged from factory workers to heiresses. Eva Weaver, a Connecticut munitions worker, was arrested along with her mother; Rose Gratz Fishstein, a Russian-born union organizer, went to jail with her sister-in-law; Caroline Spencer was a physician from Colorado Springs; the fabulously wealthy Louisine Havemeyer of New York City owned one of the finest art collections in the country; Kate Boeckh was an airplane pilot. Guards threw Dora Lewis, a fifty-five-year-old grandmother from Philadelphia’s patrician Main Line, onto the floor of her cell so brutally that she was knocked unconscious and feared dead. Alice Paul went missing because authorities locked her up in the psychopathic ward of the D.C. jail.47 The country was accustomed to police attacks on workingmen, but civil disobedience was as yet an unknown tactic and police abuse of middle-class white women was unheard of. Authorities further insulted them by breaking segregation policy to put them in cells with common criminals, that is, poor African-American women whose proximity was seen by authorities and white suffragists alike as degrading.

  Throwing political prisoners in cells with ordinary felons—in a women’s prison this usually meant prostitutes—was a tactic that dated back to the nineteenth century (and is still used around the world today). D.C. authorities added forced contact across the color line to their repertoire of punishments. “Not that we shrank from these women on account of their color,” Doris Stevens, who was one of those arrested, wrote disingenuously. “But how terrible to know that an institution had gone out of its way to bring these prisoners from their own wing to the white wing in an attempt to humiliate us.”48 Two dozen women went on a hunger strike, emulating the Pankhursts. Even with war mobilization going on, the press was magnetized; coverage was divided between sympathetic treatments and the conviction that the prisoners were getting what they deserved.

  The split between good girls and bad girls, responsible mothers and incorrigible daughters gave Wilson and Congress political cover. Carrie Catt presented herself as the reasonable older woman and became Wilson’s de facto working partner, a new friend who deplored the insult the picketers threatened. The picketers aggravated her no end: She found their tactics extreme, counterproductive, and selfish. Catt was hardly a principled opponent of racism, but in Du Bois’s Crisis, she denounced their outrage at being incarcerated with blacks. Privately, she complained bitterly to Aletta Jacobs that she was sick of the militants:

  Here am I working nights and days giving up my home and the beautiful country and living in one room in this hot city … taking no vacation and no rest and what I am doing hundreds of other women are doing for the government and yet all that counts for nothing as compared to a hysterical young girl or a fanatical woman waving a banner at the gate of the White House.49

  But in the end, she benefited from the spectacle of the militants being carted off in paddy wagons. Their out-of-bounds behavior made it all the more apparent to the Wilson administration that Catt and NAWSA could be counted on to play ball. The despised radicals and their monopoly on the nation’s attention actually put NAWSA in a position to exert pressure on Wilson and the Democratic Party. In Catt’s memoir, she sails regally past the subject of picketers and hunger strikers without mentioning it, as though they had been no more to her than a bunch of unruly girls. In retrospect, though, it seems that she needed them and they needed her. The Nineteenth Amendment’s passage finally came about because of an unacknowledged common front, a mutual dependence between old and young, mothers and daughters, women’s rights practicality and feminist rebellion.

  NAWSA members, who ostentatiously set aside their campaign to devote themselves to the war effort, provided a useful symbol of national will and self-sacrifice. Carrie Chapman Catt made a point of making war readiness NAWSA’s policy, repudiating the pacifist suffragists’ arguments—including those of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, who voted against the war resolution. In Britain, the Pankhursts threw themselves into the war effort and thereby turned themselves from hysterical hunger strikers into mothers and sisters who embodied female sacrifice for the nation and the men at the front.50 NAWSA benefited from a similar reversal of public opinion, although given the United States’ late entrance into the war and much lighter burden of sacrifice, the change was less pronounced. Helen Hamilton Gardener was a suffrage stalwart, a freethinker and popular novelist whose involvement went back to The Woman’s Bible. Now married to a well-to-do former army officer in Washington, Gardener was President Wilson’s friend and neighbor. She urged on him NAWSA’s argument for “real civilization based on a real democracy” that included women. He was now a leader, perhaps the leader of the civilized world, she reminded him. He needed to make the world and the country feel “the keen
edge of [his] disapproval of the present humiliating status of American women.”51

  In 1918, Wilson went to Congress with an emphatic request in his State of the Union speech to reward the women who, by throwing their support and good offices behind the war, had shown themselves to be citizens worthy of recognition. “What shall we say of the women … their aptitude at tasks to which they had never before set their hands; their utter self-sacrifice.… The least tribute we can pay them is to make them the equals of men in political rights as they have proved themselves their equals in every field of practical work they have entered.” He called in chips and twisted arms, continuing as the months wore on, even from the Versailles peace table.52

  Despite the president’s support, the prospects were dim. A coalition of strange bedfellows stood firm in opposition: Southern Democrats, blue-blooded New England antis, and probusiness politicians.53 When the Nineteenth Amendment finally got to the floor of Congress, it squeaked through the House by exactly the requisite two-thirds majority. In the Senate, it stalled for a year and a half, despite Wilson’s appearance on the floor to ask for support. It finally passed the Senate late in 1919.

  The insuperable obstacle was the South. So many campaigns for ratification were defeated there that it came down to a special session of the Tennessee legislature at the very last minute (before the ratification period expired). In a stifling chamber in August 1920, packed with suffragists and antis who flooded the town to line up votes, the Nineteenth Amendment passed by a two-vote majority.54

  The Nineteenth Amendment was one of many suffrage measures around the world after the war, settlements that made women’s votes a benchmark of enlightened liberalism and an ingredient of Wilsonian nationalism. In the twenty-four months after the Armistice, all belligerents except France, Italy, and Turkey gave votes to women: the United States, Britain (including Ireland, Wales, and Scotland), Germany, Austria, and the new Soviet government. The neutrals and occupied countries also made suffrage, or partial suffrage, part of the peace: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Sweden. Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, former Hapsburg domains, incorporated female suffrage at their founding moments. The British colonies of Canada, East Africa, and Rhodesia followed the imperial example.55 Enfranchised women entered their respective polities as sealants of national unity, gesturing to an identity that transcended ethnic and religious divisions.