Once it became clear that women would not be enfranchised on the arm of the black soldier, several different strategies emerged. The first, embraced by the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), founded by Stanton and Anthony in 1869, was to pressure the federal government into enfranchising women throughout the nation; this was to be done through a national organization controlled and shaped by women themselves. The second strategy was to convince state legislatures and constitutional conventions to amend state constitutions to include women in the electorate; this approach was favored by the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which was founded a few months after the NWSA and headed by Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, both veterans of the abolitionist and antebellum suffragist movements. Stone, raised in a wealthy family in western Massachusetts, was an early graduate of Oberlin College and a popular public speaker; Blackwell, from Ohio, was a dedicated reformer with a lifelong penchant for failed entrepreneurial schemes. The third strategy, more local and decentralized, yet overlapping with that of AWSA, was to wring “partial” or “limited” suffrage (on issues such as schooling, prohibition, and municipal taxes) from state authorities.22
NWSA’s approach in key respects was an extension of Radical Reconstruction: despite their break with former abolitionist allies, their distress at the Fifteenth Amendment, and their sometimes disparaging comments about black suffrage, Stanton and Anthony retained a commitment to equal rights and, for a time at least, a desire to build bridges to labor. Government “based on caste and class privilege cannot stand,” declared Stanton in 1869, and she was convinced that political rights were the solvent that would dissolve these social boundaries. Accordingly, NWSA’s strategy was to pressure the federal government to offer women the same constitutional protections given to freedmen in the Fifteenth Amendment. This view was embodied in a draft constitutional amendment introduced in Congress by Radical Republican George Julian in 1869: it declared that “the right of suffrage in the United States shall be based on citizenship” and that “all citizens . . . shall enjoy this right equally without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex.” In the increasingly conservative and pro-states’ rights political climate of the 1870s, however, this initial version of the Sixteenth Amendment—which tacitly would have nationalized suffrage in ways akin to the Wilson amendment—made little headway.23
Anthony consequently drafted a new and narrower version in the late 1870s that was first presented to the Senate by Aaron A. Sargent of California in 1878. Modeled on the Fifteenth Amendment, it stated simply that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Although NWSA also lobbied for the expansion of women’s economic and social rights, securing the passage of this amendment was the focal point of its activities, and the organization’s political allies introduced the measure into Congress every year. In 1882, both houses of Congress appointed select committees on women’s suffrage, each of which recommended passage of an amendment. Four years later, thanks in part to the energetic support of Republican Henry Blair of New Hampshire, the amendment was finally brought to a vote on the Senate floor, where, to the great disappointment of suffragists seated in the galleries, it was decisively defeated in January 1887 by a margin of thirty-four to sixteen (with twenty-six abstentions), a far cry from the two-thirds positive vote required for passage. In an echo of the regional politics that remained so salient even after the end of Reconstruction, no southern senator voted in favor of the amendment, while twenty-two voted against it. For another half dozen years, Congress continued to grapple with the issue, but after 1893, no congressional committee reported it favorably until late in the Progressive era.24
The state-by-state strategy of the AWSA bore little fruit as well. Although the issue was debated in numerous constitutional conventions, and referenda were held in eleven states (eight of them west of the Mississippi) between 1870 and 1910, concrete gains were few. The territory of Wyoming enfranchised women in 1869, a policy affirmed at statehood in 1889; Utah did the same in 1870 and 1896 (interrupted by a brief period when the federal government stripped Utah’s women of the suffrage as a curious step in its effort to rid the territory of polygamy); and Idaho and Colorado granted suffrage to women in the mid-1890s. Everywhere else, referenda failed, or the writers of new constitutions chose not to present the proposition to voters for ratification. (See Table A.20 .)25
There were, however, a significant number of locales—states, counties, and municipalities—where partial suffrage was adopted, permitting women to vote in municipal elections, on liquor licensing matters, or for local school boards and on issues affecting education. This unique, even anomalous development—enabling women to vote in certain elections but not in others—was made possible by the complex architecture of voting laws. In most states, the suffrage requirements for “nonconstitutional” elections did not have to be identical to those for offices named in state constitutions; they also could be altered by legislation rather than the cumbersome and difficult process of constitutional amendment (see Chapter 5).
The most common form of partial enfranchisement involved schools: legislatures, recognizing women’s responsibility for childrearing, as well as their education experience, responded to pressure from the suffrage movement by permitting women to vote on matters affecting schooling. Nearly all state legislatures considered adopting laws of this type, and by 1890, more than twenty states had done so. (See Table A.17.) Although activists generally viewed school suffrage as a stepping-stone, an entering wedge for broader electoral participation, legislators tended to view the matter differently: as a gesture to placate prosuffrage forces and an assertion that school matters were distinct from “politics.”26
Placating suffragists, as well as temperance reformers, also was the primary motivation behind laws permitting women to vote on liquor licenses and other matters related to the sale of alcoholic beverages. In many states, such laws were demanded by the large, rapidly growing Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which argued that women had a special interest in voting on such matters because of the impact of alcohol on the family and the links between drunkenness and domestic violence. Similarly, in the 1880s and 1890s, women in a few states were granted the right to vote in municipal elections, or if they were taxpayers, to vote on tax and bond issues. Although sanctioned by the notion that municipal governance was a form of “housekeeping,” such laws also were a response to the suffrage movement’s ongoing agitation in behalf of the inseparability of taxation and representation. Indeed, there was a conservative twist to this expansion of the franchise, since it appealed to those who believed that voting should be restricted to property owners and taxpayers.27 (See Table A.18.)28
The limited roster of successes, however, does not do justice to the strength of the movement in the 1870s and 1880s. Local prosuffrage organizations proliferated, referenda were held in numerous states, and after vigorous campaigns, hundreds of thousands of men voted in favor of women’s suffrage, a development that would have been unthinkable forty years earlier. Moreover, even in states where the issue was not submitted to a popular vote, suffrage organizations were active, state legislators were obligated to vote on suffrage bills year after year, and support for enfranchisement often cut across party lines. In Massachusetts, for example, both parties were divided on the issue, and Democrat Ben Butler twice ran for governor on prosuffrage planks. At the Illinois Constitutional Convention of 1869-1870, delegates voted forty to twenty-one to submit the question to the voters, only to reverse that vote by a narrow margin a month later. A few years later, in Pennsylvania, the issue was the subject of a lively debate at the constitutional convention, and in the 1880s the Indiana House of Representatives voted several times to endorse women’s suffrage, only to see its actions blocked by Senate filibusters encouraged by fear that female voters would restrict the sale of intoxicating liquors. In California, the constitut
ional convention of 1878-1879 devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to the question; after prolonged and passionate debate, suffrage was restricted to men by a margin of only ten votes.29
One reason for the growing support was the power of prosuffrage arguments. Impressively diverse, these arguments were voiced not only by suffrage activists but also by political figures, usually but not always Republican, who found themselves in legislatures or constitutional conventions where they had to think through and vote on the issue. The most common argument remained the natural or universal rights view put forward at Seneca Falls and throughout the 1850s. “Woman’s right to the ballot seems so clear that it is like some of the mathematical axioms which it is difficult to more clearly define than by stating them,” declared an Ohioan in 1874.
Each individual on entering a state of society surrenders a portion of natural rights, and in return therefore receives, among others, the political right of the elective franchise. A woman is an individual, and when she enters into a state of society and thereby surrenders a portion of her natural rights, she receives in return therefore the right of the elective franchise, equally with man. . . . If the syllogism be correct the right inevitably follows, and where logic leads I cheerfully follow.
“Whatever rights are given to one citizen ought to be given . . . to every other citizen,” echoed Eli T. Blackmer, superintendent of the San Diego public schools, at the California Constitutional Convention of 1878. Although voting was not a “natural right,” conceded Democrat John Campbell, the youngest member of Pennsylvania’s constitutional convention of 1872-1873, it was a “political right” that ought not be denied to women. Evoking the traditional language of American republicanism, all Americans were believed to be entitled to self-government—and all Americans included women. An Ohio delegate insisted that “woman . . . have a voice in the enactment of laws to which she is subject. . . . There should be, with us, no subject class. In a genuine, democratic republican government, the governed are also the governors.” The governor of Kansas, in 1871, insisted that in a “true republic—a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’” there should be no “favored class of ‘white male citizen.’”30
Emerging alongside these traditional views was another, more essentialist strand of argument: that women possessed particular qualities or virtues that would improve the character of politics and governance. Such views began to be uttered by Stanton and other suffragists in the late 1860s, and they were embraced by many male politicians who seemed more comfortable stressing women’s unique virtues rather than their similarity to men. The presence of women, it was argued, would elevate the tone of politics and put an end to “scoundrelism and ruffianism at the polls,” particularly in urban areas. Enfranchising women would “tend to impart integrity and honesty to politics, and to control the tricks of those who make politics their trade.” In addition, female voters would be less corruptible and more likely to promote policies favoring social justice, peace, and sobriety: “when our mothers, wives, and sisters vote with us, we will have purer legislation, and better execution of the laws, fewer tippling shops, gambling halls, and brothels.” According to this line of argument, which became preeminent by the end of the 1870s, women ought to be enfranchised not because they were identical to men but precisely because they were different—and the qualities that made them different would be a boon to American political life.31
For some men, at least, this essentialist vision—the notion that women had special qualities and virtues—was both Christian and Jeffersonian, emotional as well as political. In Texas in 1875, for example, a delegate to the constitutional convention introduced the following resolution:That women, being by the ordinances of nature, the mother of all living human beings . . . and that, as mother, wife, sister and daughter, she has the first care of our lives, is our nurse in childhood, our mentor in youth, our companion, helper and consoler in manhood, our comforting, ministering and sustaining angel in death, even at the birth, trial, death and resurrection of Jesus . . . and that, in this land of republican faith and representative, democratic government, by every recognition of modern, enlightened Christian civilization, she is morally and mentally man’s equal; that the same “inalienable rights” that Jefferson has made household words . . . are as much woman’s as man’s; . . . and inasmuch as woman is of the people, and must be governed by the laws made by the people, and is often a taxpayer, there is no reason, political, human or divine . . . why she should not have the same rights at the ballot-box that man has.32
This essentialist argument could have a conservative thrust as well: the virtues of women could be counted on to preserve the traditional social order, to protect property, order, and stability, particularly against the vices of the urban working class.33
Other arguments were also mobilized. Prosuffrage convention delegates maintained (probably inaccurately) that the public desired woman suffrage and thus that the conventions should respond to the will of the people. Some of their allies invoked the principle of “no taxation without representation,” while others claimed that enfranchisement would provide economic benefits and workplace protection to the growing number of female wage earners. More intellectually minded advocates offered broad historical portraits, pointing to the progressive enlargement of the franchise as a sign of the steady and beneficent erosion of oppression and “aristocracy.” John M. Broomall, a former congressman and Republican delegate to the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1872-1873, concluded a lengthy speech by announcing thatThis thing is coming. It is only a question of time. The progress is onward. For thirty years I have been an advocate of universal self-government, and during that time I have marked the progress of it steadily onward. At first, nobody was a man, in the sense of the “governed,” unless he was a white man; and indeed some white men were hardly counted. . . . That word “white” . . . was washed out with blood.
He continued:Four hundred years ago women, according to the popular notion of that day, had no souls. . . . Still later than that, the women were beasts of burden. . . . Still the world moves, and in our time they have been granted equal civil rights with men. The next step is coming, and there are those living who will see it. . . . That step is equality of all human beings both before the law and in the making of the law. Thus it is that the world moves, and the man who is not prepared to keep pace with its motion had better get out of the way.34
Still others, both politicians and female suffragists, put forward a more conservative—and ominous—rationale: that it was wrong for the polity to enfranchise ignorant blacks and foreigners while barring educated, native-born white women. One delegate to Ohio’s constitutional convention in 1873 lamented the decision “to confer this great privilege upon the ignorant alien—the Chinaman, the Japanese, the Ashantees, and to everything that wears human hair from any part of God’s earth, because they are ‘male,’ and yet withhold it from the American woman who may desire it, for the only reason that she is a female.” Similarly, a Californian in 1879 asked whether there wasany right, or justice, or decency, in a law which gives the elective franchise to the most ignorant, debased, and brutal man in the land, whether born here or abroad, and denies it to Mrs. Stanton, a cultivated and intellectual woman, descended from revolutionary forefathers, and able to go before a committee of the United States Senate and make an argument on constitutional law that would have done credit to any gentleman on this floor or in this nation?
At times in the 1870s and 1880s, this rationale went a giant step beyond fairness and acquired a more overtly politicized, racist edge: female suffrage would benefit society because white native-born women outnumbered—and would outvote—blacks, the Chinese, aliens, or transients. The political dominance of “Americans,” therefore, would be insured by the enfranchisement of women.35
Faced with this powerful array of arguments, opponents of women’s suffrage in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s responded with expressions of an altogether different c
onception of gender roles, with convictions heavily laden with moralism, religion, and fears of social and familial turmoil. In sharp and revealing contrast to other debates about the franchise, opponents of expansion rarely argued that women lacked the intelligence to participate in politics or that their enfranchisement would damage the political order. Instead they insisted that women themselves would be degraded by participating in politics, that their nature made them unsuitable for the rough-and-tumble world of politics. “I believe that women occupy in many respects a higher position than men,” observed a Californian in 1879, “and I, for one, do not wish to drag them down from that exalted sphere.” Some maintained that the prospect of being dragged down “into the very filth and mire of degradation and human infamy” would mean that only the “worst” women actually would vote, while others (including antisuffrage women) claimed that most women in fact did not want to be enfranchised. Opponents of women’s suffrage also invoked repeatedly the notion that voting ought to be linked to military service—which led to the following memorable exchange between two delegates to the California convention of 1879:MR. CAPLES: What is political sovereignty? It is the fruits of the sword. It has always been the fruits of the sword. . . . Where would be that power that you represent at the ballot box today but for that sword that has maintained it from the time of the Revolution down to the present day. . . . The right to vote, the power of sovereignty, does rest right squarely upon the basis of the ability of men to wield the sword.
MR. MCFARLAND: I would like to ask the gentleman if he holds that the right to vote depends upon skill in wielding the sword? If that be so, I know a little actress who can run the gentleman through the ribs in two minutes.
The Right to Vote Page 28
