This sustained, nationwide contraction of suffrage rights had several root causes. Stated most broadly, those who wielded economic and social power in the rapidly changing late nineteenth century found it difficult to control the state (which they increasingly needed) under conditions of full democratization. In the South, the abolition of slavery, coupled with the beginnings of industrialization and the compelling need for a docile, agricultural labor force, created pressures that overwhelmed fledgling democratic institutions. In the North and West, the explosive growth of manufacturing and of labor-intensive extractive industries generated class conflict on a scale that the nation had never known. As Max Weber noted long ago, it is during periods of rapid economic and technological change that class becomes most salient and class issues most prominent. The United States was not the only country whose political institutions were profoundly shaken by the stresses of industrialism.97
Yet these economic and class factors would not by themselves, in all likelihood, have produced such a marked and widespread narrowing of the entries to voting booths. Equally critical was the fact that the threatening lower orders consisted largely of men who were racially different or came from different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. What transpired in the South seems unimaginable in the absence of racial hostility and prejudice. Similarly, the changes in voting laws in the North and the West were made possible, and shaped, by the presence of millions of immigrants and their children, indeed by the very foreignness of Jews and Chinese, of the Irish and Italian Catholics, of Indians and Mexicans. Their ethnic identities, fused with their class position, made these new (or Native) Americans seem both threatening and inferior, necessary and legitimate targets of political discrimination; rolling back the franchise would have been a far more difficult task in a racially and ethnically homogeneous society. It was the convergence of racial and ethnic diversity with class tension that fueled the movement to “reform” suffrage.
One other factor, admittedly more speculative, also may have played a role: the absence of war. In light of the rest of the nation’s history, it does not seem coincidental that this prolonged period of franchise contraction occurred during a prolonged period of peace. (The United States did launch an imperial war in 1898, but it was relatively brief, did not require mass recruitment, and was fought largely by eager volunteers.) The wartime conditions that commonly spawned pressures for franchise expansion simply were not present; forces tending in the opposite direction thus could triumph all the more readily. Indeed, from the era of Reconstruction to World War I, the United States never had much of an army or any need for military mobilization. The political aftermath of the Spanish-American War, moreover, paralleled the antidemocratic drift of domestic politics. In annexed territories overseas, the national government, led by Republicans, deprived men who were racially and ethnically different of political rights, a step easily sanctioned by the claim that Filipinos, Hawaiians, and Cubans were not ready for self-government and that suffrage always had been a matter of expediency. Not even the Constitution, with its very limited protection of voting rights, followed the flag. Southern Democrats applauded these imperial policies, seeing in them Republican recognition of the wisdom of disfranchisement in the South.98
The parallels between North and South, of course, ought not be overdrawn. What transpired in the southern states was far more draconian, sweeping, and violent. The disfranchisement was massive rather than segmented, the laws were enforced brutally, and they were always administered with overtly discriminatory intent. In New York and Massachusetts, an illiterate immigrant could gain the franchise by learning to read; for a black man in Alabama, education was beside the point, whatever the law said. That the redemption of the North was far milder than the parallel movement in the South was testimony not only to the significance of race but also to differences in the regions’ social structures and political organizations. Northern society was too fluid, heterogeneous, and urban to permit the successful imposition of a project as sweeping as the Mississippi plan. Moreover, the existence of an already competitive party system, with elite and middle-class elements supporting each party, meant that efforts at wholesale disfranchisement—as was contemplated in New York in the 1870s—were certain to encounter fierce resistance and likely to meet defeat. At the same time, the ability of the dominant parties to integrate and incorporate many working-class and immigrant voters made mass disfranchisement less necessary: the Democratic Party in the North (unlike the heavily black Republican Party in the South) did not threaten the established order.99
Both North and South, however, the legal contraction of the franchise made a difference. Millions of people—most of them working class and poor—were deprived of the right to vote in municipal, state, and national elections. Their exclusion from the electorate meant that the outcomes of innumerable political contests were altered, different policies were put into place, different judges appointed, different taxes imposed. Third-party insurgencies were deprived of a potential electoral base, and the relative strength of the two major parties, in at least some cities and states, was reversed. Many of the core institutions of the modern American state—institutions built and solidified between Reconstruction and World War I—were indeed shaped and accepted by a polity that was far from democratic. It was an apt symbol of the era that Congress voted to enfranchise residents of the District of Columbia in 1871 and then disfranchised them a few years later, transforming the city into a municipal corporation governed by an appointed commission.100
SIX
Women’s Suffrage
To get the word “male” in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign. . . . During that time they were forced to conduct 56 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 state 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.
—CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT AND NETTIE R. SHULER,
Woman Suffrage and Politics (1926)
MR. HALFHILL: Now, gentlemen, this question of franchise is not, as has been sometimes debated and urged, an inalienable right; it is a conferred right, and it must be conferred under our theory of government and under our organization of society. MR. FACKLER: If suffrage is a conferred right and not a natural one, who conferred that right on us?
—OHIO CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1912
THE HISTORY OF VOTING RIGHTS FOR WOMEN carved its own path through the political landscape. As half the population, women constituted the largest group of adults excluded from the franchise at the nation’s birth and throughout the nineteenth century. Their efforts to gain the right to vote persisted for more than seventy years, eventually giving rise to the nation’s largest mass movement for suffrage, as well as a singular countermovement of citizens opposed to their own enfranchisement. Women enjoyed (or at least possessed) different, more intimate relationships with the men who could enfranchise them than did other excluded groups, such as African Americans, aliens, or the propertyless. Moreover, the debates sparked by the prospect of enfranchising women had unusual features—with fairly conventional propositions about political rights and capacities contending with deeply felt and publicly voiced fears that female participation in electoral politics would undermine family life and sully women themselves.
Yet distinctive as this history may have been, it always ran alongside and frequently intersected with other currents in the chronicle of suffrage. The broad antebellum impulse toward democratization helped to fuel the movement for women’s rights; decades later, the reaction against universal suffrage retarded its progress. Black suffrage and women’s suffrage were closely linked issues everywhere in the 1860s and in the South well into the twentieth
century; similarly, the voting rights of immigrants and the poor pressed repeatedly against the claims of women in the North and West. To some degree, this interlacing was inherent and structural. Women, after all, were not a socially segregated group; they were black and white, rich and poor, foreign-born and native. But the links between the evolution of suffrage for women and for men also were shaped by more contingent events: by the rhythms of social change, the dynamics of partisan politics, and the accidents of historical timing.
From Seneca Falls to the Fifteenth Amendment
The movement to enfranchise women in the United States had its legendary beginnings at a convention held in July 1848, in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York. The convention was the brainchild of two women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. Mott, from Philadelphia, was already a well-known public figure, a Quaker minister and ardent abolitionist, revered for her compassionate manner and eloquence as a speaker. Stanton, a generation younger and the daughter of a judge, was married to Henry B. Stanton, a prominent abolitionist who recently had settled in Seneca Falls, not far from Rochester. The two women renewed an earlier acquaintance while Mott was visiting a friend in the nearby town of Waterloo. Their conversations led to a publicly announced call for a “convention” to “discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of woman.”1
The convention, held in a local church and featuring Mott as a speaker, attracted nearly three hundred people, including many men. Most of those who attended were from Seneca Falls, Waterloo, or Rochester; roughly a quarter were Quakers. After two days of discussion, one hundred of the participants approved and signed a set of resolutions calling for equal rights for women, including “their sacred right to the elective franchise.” The convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, drafted by Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, declared “that all men and women are created equal” and protested the denial to women of “this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation” and “oppressed on all sides.” Laws made only by men, the declaration detailed, relegated women to an inferior place in the social, civil, and economic order.2
That women throughout the nation lacked the right to vote in 1848 reflected beliefs and values long embedded in the politics and culture of the United States and western Europe. Although women were regarded as intelligent adults, they were viewed as having capacities different from those of men, capacities appropriate to private life and the domestic sphere rather than the public world of politics. More decisively perhaps, women—who were envisaged and treated in law as members of families rather than as autonomous individuals—were excluded from the polity for the same reason that the poor and propertyless were disfranchised in the late eighteenth century: they purportedly lacked the “independence” necessary for participation in electoral politics. Economically dependent on men, as well as legally subservient to them, women, in Blackstonian fashion, could be controlled by men and thus could not be responsible political actors. Concomitantly, women were not believed to need the franchise because, in a gendered version of “virtual representation,” their interests were defended by the men in their families, presumably husbands and fathers.3
To be sure, not everyone accepted such views, even in the late eighteenth century. Abigail Adams’s well-known admonition that her husband “remember the ladies” was only one expression of the belief that the rights of women ought to be enlarged, and some of her contemporaries, unlike Adams, even believed that women could play a public role in political life. Moreover, the experience of New Jersey, where women participated in elections for more than a decade, suggests that the enfranchisement of women was neither unthinkable nor catastrophically disruptive of the political order. Even William Griffith, one of the state’s vocal opponents of female suffrage, stressed that the primary “mischief ” caused by women voting was that it gave “the towns and populous villages . . . an unfair advantage over the country” because women could get to the polls more easily in the towns.4
Nonetheless, women remained outside the polity throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, and efforts to promote their inclusion were rare. The idea of enfranchising women was raised briefly at a few constitutional conventions in the antebellum era; Kentucky in 1838 went so far as to permit propertied widows and unmarried women to vote in school elections. But the issue was not widely debated during this period, and most references to women, in constitutional discussions of suffrage, were designed to demonstrate that voting was a privilege, not a right: since everyone agreed that women should not vote, it clearly could not be a right. As Abigail Adams’s husband had noted, any claim that voting was a right logically led to the enfranchisement of even women and children.5
The timing of the Seneca Falls convention—and the emergence of women’s suffrage as a public issue—was far from accidental. The decades preceding Seneca Falls had witnessed the expansion of an urban and quasi-urban middle class in much of the North, a growing concentration of city and townspeople, some of them professionals, who valued and embraced an expansion of civil, economic, and political rights. At the same time, the number of women in the paid labor force increased sharply, leading many women to be exposed as individuals—not simply as family members—to the vicissitudes of the market and the consequences of state policies. These shifts in the social structure fostered diverse efforts to rethink and promote the rights of women in the family, churches, and society at large. In addition, the antislavery movement proved to be a breeding ground—and training ground—for advocates of women’s rights: actively abolitionist women were frustrated by being treated as second-class members of the movement, while some male abolitionists were led, by the logic of their own convictions, to embrace gender as well as racial equality.6
Of equal importance were the spillover effects of the era’s broader democratizing currents. The termination of property and taxpaying restrictions on voting, as well as debates about the enfranchisement of aliens and African Americans, threw open the logical and rhetorical doors to the further expansion of suffrage. If the propertyless (who also had been viewed as dependent) could vote, if noncitizens could vote, if voting were indeed a natural right, then why should women continue to be excluded? The Pandora’s box had, in fact, been opened, and it proved difficult to slam shut: arguments that had been mobilized to enfranchise men could readily be applied to women as well. To at least some women, the refusal of political leaders to acknowledge these parallels underscored the need for a suffrage movement—and the need for conventions (not just meetings) that would reestablish fundamental principles of governance much as state constitutional conventions were doing. It was likely not coincidental that the Seneca Falls gathering occurred in the wake of a New York State Constitutional Convention that had ridiculed, and given short shrift to, the idea of enfranchising women.7
In fact, the meeting at Seneca Falls was only one of numerous conventions called to promote women’s rights in the late 1840s and early 1850s; its special place in historical memory, as Nancy Isenberg has pointed out, stems partially from Stanton’s subsequent role as the preeminent leader and chronicler of the movement. In the spring of 1850, a similar convention was held in Salem, Ohio; with men sitting quietly in the balcony, women drew up and debated resolutions to be forwarded to the forthcoming state constitutional convention. Several months later, the first national “woman’s rights” meeting was convened in Worcester, Massachusetts, initiating a series of annual events to mobilize support for full citizenship for women and their equal treatment under the law.8
Although suffrage had been one demand among many in 1848, it soon became foremost on the agenda of a growing feminist movement that held meetings, sponsored lectures, and petitioned legislatures throughout the 1850s. “The Right of Suffrage,” resolved the second national convention in 1851, “is . . . the corner-stone of this enterprise, since we do not seek to protect woman, but rather to place her in a position to pr
otect herself.” This demand, as historian Ellen DuBois has pointed out, was a radical one: it implied that the interests of women could not be adequately protected as long as men held a monopoly on political power, that women had to be empowered rather than protected. Nonetheless, the argument for suffrage generally was couched in traditional republican language: voting was a right that ought to belong to all adults, including women; all of the governed had the right to choose their governors. Familiar as the rhetoric may have been, the movement was slow to garner support: although significant measures were passed to improve the legal and economic status of women, no states granted them the franchise in the 1850s. At the beginning of the Civil War, suffrage advocates, most of whom were strongly invested in the antislavery cause, temporarily scaled back their efforts to give the war, and black rights, priority.9
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