The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  Opponents further insisted that voting was not a natural right and that women did not need to vote because their civil rights already were amply protected. “If there be any one thing settled in the long discussion of this subject it is that suffrage is not a natural right, but is simply a means of government,” declared New York delegate (and later senator and secretary of war) Elihu Root in 1894. “The question is therefore a question of expediency.”36

  But the core of the opposition was more emotional: a deeply felt anxiety that enfranchising women would deform natural gender roles and destroy family life. “What is this demand that is being made?” asked the irrepressible Mr. Caples in California in 1879.

  This fungus growth upon the body of modern civilization is no such modest thing as the mere privilege of voting, by any means. . . . The demand is for the abolition of all distinctions between men and women, proceeding upon the hypothesis that men and women are all the same. . . . Gentlemen ought to know what is the great and inevitable tendency of this modern heresy, this lunacy, which of all lunacies is the mischievous and most destructive. It attacks the integrity of the family; it attacks the eternal degrees of God Almighty; it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood.

  Statements such as Caples’s—remarkable as they sound to twentieth-century ears—were not uncommon during this period. A few years earlier, a Pennsylvania politician, W. H. Smith, declared that he opposed the “pernicious heresy” of women’s suffrage because “my mother was a woman, and further, because my wife is a woman.” If women could vote, “the family . . . would be utterly destroyed.” An Ohioan viewed “this attempt to obliterate the line of demarcation . . . between the sexes” as “one phase of the infidelity of our time.” That infidelity often was overtly sexualized: admitting women into the public arena would encourage promiscuity, undermine the purity of women, and expose them to the irresistible predations of men. In addition, the sexual charms and seductiveness of women would distort the ways in which men voted: “the young lady would control everything with the young gallants,” insisted an Ohio politician. Those who resisted reform further claimed that the enfranchisement of women would create dissension within families, that inescapably there would be arguments between husband and wife that would fracture the family, “the most ancient and uninterrupted social community”; it would produce “horrible strife and derangement of domestic relations.” “The whole country—every household,” noted the much-agitated Mr. Smith, “would or might be the scene of everlasting quarrels.”37

  Advocates of suffrage devoted considerable energy to rebutting such views. They spurned the notion that “self-government” was “degrading” as “sentimental twaddle” and denied flatly that “only low class women would vote.” They countered the idea that “woman” was “outside her sphere when she casts her ballot” by pointing out both that higher education once had been considered outside the sphere of women and that women themselves ought to determine the boundaries of their sphere. That enfranchising women would destroy the family was dismissed as baseless, as was the charge that voting would somehow erode the special virtues of females. In response to the claim that the franchise ought to be yoked to military service, a California politician asked, “is fighting all there is to be done in this country? . . . Look at the greatest heroes of the wars of the world, and tell me who of them all did as much as Miss Florence Nightingale?” A Pennsylvanian with similar views asked whether clergy-men, who did not fight, also should be excluded from the polls. By the mid-1870s, proponents frequently invoked the precedent of Wyoming, where women voted and nothing calamitous had occurred.38

  Although advocates of suffrage surely got the better of the argument, their rhetorical sallies did not vanquish the opposition. Far from it. Logical arguments could carry the movement only so far, and resistance was firmly lodged in several different quarters. Most fundamentally, perhaps, many women themselves were either opposed, or relatively indifferent, to their own enfranchisement. In the United States, as elsewhere, the demand for suffrage was most resonant among middle-class women, women from families engaged in the professions, trade or commerce, and educated women who lived in cities and developing towns. These were the women whose experiences and desires clashed most directly with traditional norms and who were most likely to seek the independence, autonomy, and equality that enfranchisement represented. Yet such women, although more numerous with each passing year, were far from a majority in 1880. Farm women, living in greater isolation and in more traditional social structures, were less responsive to calls for suffrage as well as more difficult to mobilize into collective action (they were, however, increasingly active in women’s clubs, which sometimes led them into more politicized activities). Similarly, urban working-class women, many from immigrant families, did not rush to join a movement that addressed their pressing economic needs only obliquely and sometimes seemed inhospitable to the foreign-born. Upper-class women, meanwhile, often became the leaders of formally organized antisuffrage campaigns and organizations: defending what Susan Marshall (among others) has called their “gendered class position,” these women, who already had access to power and could wield influence through their wealth, had little need for the ballot and little interest in democratization.39

  The political pressure that suffragists could exert thus was limited by their numbers, too limited to overcome the entrenched ideological and psychological resistance of many male voters and politicians. The campaigns for suffrage, moreover, generated organized opposition from some interest groups. The identification of suffrage with temperance and prohibition, for example, sparked an antisuffrage reaction among brewers and liquor retailers. This reaction was shared by some immigrants who felt culturally assaulted by the attack on alcohol, not to mention (although it rarely is mentioned) the rather large number of individuals who simply liked to drink or wanted the freedom to have a drink. Machine politicians also were dubious about women’s suffrage—in part for cultural reasons and in part because they always sought to keep the electorate as manageable as possible. Equally skeptical, and sometimes downright hostile, were conservative members of the economic elite who took seriously the proposition that women would promote egalitarian social reforms. Reinforcing these diverse sources of antagonism was the generally declining faith in democracy. “At the bottom of this opposition is a subtle distrust of American institutions, an idea of ‘restricted suffrage’ which is creeping into our republic through so-called aristocratic channels,” observed Harriette R. Shattuck in 1884. To some degree (and to a degree that later would grow) the resistance to enfranchising women was a resistance to enfranchising any new voters at all.40

  These broad social and political patterns help to explain the particularly slow progress of women’s suffrage in the South. There were, of course, active suffragists in the region, both white and black; there also were male politicians, usually Republican, who embraced the cause in constitutional conventions and state legislatures. Still, the movement was slow to gather steam: suffrage organizations were far smaller and less visible than in the North, no referenda were held, and even school-district suffrage remained a rarity. This lag had two critical sources. The first was the South’s predominantly rural, agricultural social structure. The social strata most receptive to woman suffrage—urban, professional, educated, middle-class—emerged belatedly and slowly in the South. Most women continued to live in an entirely agricultural world, while elite women from plantation and textile-manufacturing families often joined a vocal antisuffragist countermovement. The second reason that the movement lagged was race. Although suffrage advocates argued that their enfranchisement would solidify white supremacy—because white women outnumbered black men and women—this claim made little headway with white male Southerners: to them, women’s suffrage meant opening the door to a large new constituency of black voters, something to be avoided at all costs. As Senator Joseph E. Brown of Georgia put it in 1887, little could “be said in favor of adding to the voti
ng population all the females of that race.” In addition, the movement for a national suffrage amendment was repellent to southern Democrats, who perceived such an amendment as yet another federal threat to states’ rights.41

  If the South was particularly resistant to enfranchising women, the West was unusually receptive. All of the states that fully enfranchised women in the nineteenth century were west of the Mississippi, as were most states that held referenda on the issue. This regional pattern has elicited from historians an array of plausible, if not altogether convincing, explanations: the egalitarian influences of frontier life, the desire to encourage settlement, a western revival of a Puritan urge to purify politics, the opportunities presented by the convening of constitutional conventions at statehood, the egalitarian thrust of western Populism, and a heightened valuing of women resulting from unusually large male-to-female population ratios. Recent studies, however, have suggested that these broad western phenomena may have been less significant than the unusual political circumstances that prevailed in the handful of states (Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah) where suffrage was achieved. In Colorado, for example, the temporary strength of the People’s Party appears to have been crucial to the 1893 success of women’s suffrage. In Utah, the enfranchisement of women was certainly—if not simply—linked to the complex politics of gender spawned by the efforts of a Mormon territory, with a tradition of polygamy, to gain national acceptance and statehood.42

  Indeed, the history of the right to vote in general suggests that the search for any single-factor explanation of regional differences is misguided: groups of nonvoters, as a rule, gained the franchise only when there was a convergence of several different factors—from a list of possibilities that included grassroots pressure, ideological resonance, wartime mobilization, economic incentives, class interest, and partisan advantage. Some of these (e.g., grassroots mobilization and ideological appeal) were present in numerous states, both east and west of the Mississippi—which is why debates over enfranchising women often were sharply contested and closely fought. What seems to have tipped the balance in a handful of western states (as well, perhaps, as in western states that dominated the first twentieth-century wave of suffrage victories) was a combination of several additional ingredients. One was a more fluid pattern of party competition, due in part to the strength of the insurgent Farmers’ Alliance and shortly later, the People’s Party. Another was that western states tended to be dominated by land-owning farm families yet included a highly visible number of working-class transients who labored in mining, railroading, and agriculture. Since the latter group consisted overwhelmingly of single males, the enfranchisement of women offered discernible political benefits to the settler population at the expense of workers in extractive industries (and the companies that sometimes were believed to control their votes).43

  Finally, most western states between 1850 and the 1890s did not experience the massive growth of an industrial working class that triggered such an antidemocratic reaction in the East and Midwest. The region’s swing against democracy was more mild and emotionally focused on the largely male Chinese population. Although the West did share in the nation’s ideological retreat from universal suffrage, the relative shallowness of that retreat may have left open a larger political space in which the political rights of women could be considered and embraced.

  Doldrums and Democracy

  I think it was Wendell Phillips who said something like this, “if women are like men, then they certainly possess the same brain and that should entitle them to the ballot; if they are not like men, then they certainly need the ballot, for no man can understand what they want.” And we ask you upon those lines to give the ballot to women.

  —CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT TO THE

  DELAWARE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1897

  I provide a home for my wife, and I expect her to do her share in maintaining it, and I think that is reasonable enough. If we give women the vote our wives will soon be absorbed in caucuses instead of in housekeeping. They will be drafted on juries too. When I come home at night I expect my wife to be there, and not in a political caucus or locked up in a jury room with eight or ten men.

  —ASSEMBLYMAN SHEA OF ESSEX, NEW YORK, 1910

  In October 1893, the New York Times declared in an editorial that “the cause of woman suffrage does not seem to have made the least progress in this part of the country in the last quarter of a century, if indeed it has not lost ground.” Although the Times was hardly an unbiased observer—it would editorialize against women’s suffrage well into the twentieth century—its observation was difficult to dispute. Only a tiny portion of the nation’s women was fully enfranchised, interest was flagging in many states, and as the Times observed, most of the women who were entitled to vote in school board elections did not show up at the polls. The optimistic days when woman suffrage seemed to be a goal within easy reach were over. 44

  Suffrage activists responded to their lack of success—and to the economic and political circumstances that had changed around them—by unifying the two competing suffrage organizations into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1890. Although Stanton and Anthony were the first two presidents of the merged association, power was gradually handed off to a younger generation of leaders, including Anna Howard Shaw, who had risen from a childhood of frontier poverty to gain a medical degree, and Carrie Chapman Catt, a former teacher and journalist from Iowa. Catt, who proved to have exceptional administrative talents, spent years transforming NAWSA from a loosely run association into an efficient organization that carefully tracked its membership and finances, established permanent headquarters in each state, sponsored courses in political science and economics, and coordinated national, state, and local campaigns. By the end of the 1890s, NAWSA had created branches in every state, founded hundreds of local clubs, generated large quantities of literature, and was pressuring politicians everywhere. NAWSA also began to target and raise funds from wealthy, upper-class women, some of whom for the first time were lending their support to the movement.45

  These organizational changes were accompanied by shifts in ideology—or at least by shifts in the emphases placed on various arguments. Mirroring the broader middle-and upper-class disenchantment with democracy, suffragists placed less weight on equal rights arguments, which implied that everyone, male and female, should possess the right to vote. They stressed instead the more palatable essentialist theme that feminine qualities would be a welcome addition to the polity: that theme, in addition to conforming with traditional notions of gender roles, had the advantage of avoiding the implication that blacks and immigrant workers also should be enfranchised. This essentialist emphasis was reinforced by the increasingly common claim that women had distinct economic and social interests that could only be protected by possession of the right to vote.46

  As important, white middle-class suffragists placed new weight on the argument that the enfranchisement of women would compensate for and counterbalance the votes of the ignorant and undesirable. This conservative notion, with its unmistakable class and racial edge, had been voiced since the late 1860s, but only in the late 1880s and 1890s did it become commonplace.47 Catt herself decried the enfranchisement of some Native Americans and spoke disparagingly of immigrants, particularly those from eastern and southern Europe:Today there has arisen in America a class of men not intelligent, not patriotic, not moral, nor yet not pedigreed. In causes and conventions, it is they who nominate officials, at the polls through corrupt means, it is they who elect them and by bribery, it is they who secure the passage of many a legislative measure.

  The best means of limiting the influence of such voters and of perpetuating “the American Republic” was to enfranchise native-born American women. “The census of 1890 proves that women hold the solution in their hands. . . . Expediency demands it as the policy which alone can lift our nation from disgrace.” Olympia Brown, a Universalist minister from Wisconsin, gave more precise numbers
in 1889.

  There are in the United States three times as many American-born women as the whole foreign population, men and women together, so that the votes of women will eventually be the only means of overcoming this foreign influence and maintaining our free institutions. There is no possible safety for our free school, our free church or our republican government, unless women are given the suffrage and that right speedily.48

  In the South, of course, the American Republic was thought to be threatened not by immigrants but by blacks, and some suffragists offered to meet that threat through what Henry Blackwell, as early as 1867, called “the statistical argument.” (Blackwell’s reiteration of this argument, entitled “A Solution to the Southern Question,” was published by NAWSA in 1890.) As Mississippi native Belle Kearney put it at the NAWSA convention of 1903, “Anglo-Saxon women” were “the medium through which to retain the supremacy of the white race over the African.” Kearney maintained that the “enfranchisement of women would insure immediate and durable white supremacy, honestly attained.” To be sure, the relationship between women’s suffrage and black enfranchisement in the South was complicated. Many white suffragists declined to play the race card, and even some who did were motivated less by a commitment to white supremacy than by the search for a potent line of attack. In addition, the ranks of southern suffragists included a growing number of African-American women. The most strident antagonists of black rights, moreover, belonged to the anti-women’s suffrage camp: one of the principal arguments against female enfranchisement from 1890 to 1920 was that it would open an additional door to black voting and possibly to federal intervention in election laws. Nonetheless, the currency of the statistical argument, particularly coupled with NAWSA’s own tolerance of segregation, highlighted the distance that the movement had traveled from the equal rights impulses of the 1860s. At the 1903 NAWSA meeting, held in New Orleans, the executive board formally affirmed its recognition of “states’ rights,” effectively permitting southern chapters to bar blacks from membership.49