The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  In both the North and South, the notion that women were the antidote to undesirable voters led many suffragists, including Stanton, to join the conservative chorus calling for literacy tests as a means of shaping the electorate. In a well-known article entitled “Educated Suffrage,” Stanton in 1895 proposed doing away with the “ignorant foreign vote” by instituting a test for “intelligent reading and writing.” Speaking to a Senate committee in 1898, she declared that “the popular objection to woman suffrage is that it would ‘double the ignorant vote.’ The patent answer to this is ‘abolish the ignorant vote’” (which Stanton, in any case, believed was “solid against woman’s emancipation”). At the 1902 convention of NAWSA, she insisted that immigrants “not become a part of our ruling power until they can read and write the English language intelligently and understand the principles of republican government.” Although Stanton’s longstanding radicalism kept her xenophobia in check (she opposed immigration restriction and pressed hard for free, compulsory education), she and many other suffragists effectively abandoned the principle of universal suffrage in favor of increasingly popular class-based limitations on electoral participation. They were not unopposed in this stance: Stanton’s own daughter, Harriot Stanton Blatch, publicly dissented from her mother’s view in the 1890s. But advocacy of restrictions on the right to vote had entered the mainstream of feminist thought.50

  The sources of this ideological shift were several. Most important, perhaps, white, native-born, middle-class women, like their male counterparts, had less faith in democracy and universal suffrage than they had possessed thirty years earlier. Women, as well as men, reacted to the political turmoil in the South, to massive immigration, and to the growth of urban political machines by concluding that the franchise should be restricted—even while arguing that the portals to politics should be opened to them. In addition, as historian Steven Buechler has pointed out, changes in the nation’s social structure altered the class location and attitudes of many suffrage advocates: with the growth of a national elite and a foreign-born working class, the midcentury view of a relatively porous boundary separating workers from members of the middle class was becoming untenable. Given such a shift, suffragists who embraced middle-class values found themselves sliding from the “class blind” ideology of equal rights to the more class-conscious embrace of “educated suffrage.” This conservative tilt was accentuated by the entry into the suffrage movement of upper-class women who self-consciously sought to defend the existing social order through politics. Finally, many suffragists—whatever their deepest convictions—may have resorted to these restrictionist and even racist claims in order to counter their opponents’ arguments and win adherents in an increasingly conservative political climate. As is often true in public debates, each side’s utterances were partial reflections of the arguments of their adversaries.51

  If feminists believed that their conservative posture would speed the passage of new suffrage laws, they were sorely mistaken. Despite the more sophisticated organizing techniques developed by Catt and her colleagues, the 1890s and 1900s witnessed few concrete gains, and the period from 1896 to 1910 came to be known among suffragists as “the doldrums.” During this period, only six referenda on suffrage were held, three of them in Oregon: all six were soundly defeated. Although the issue was raised repeatedly in state legislatures and constitutional conventions, there were no new additions to the suffrage column. New York rebuffed its suffragists in 1894, as did California in 1896, and Washington in 1898. In 1895, Massachusetts even underwent the demoralizing spectacle of a mock (or nonbinding) referendum on municipal suffrage that was overwhelmingly defeated and for which only 23,000 women (out of a possible 600,000) turned out to vote. To be sure, some progress was made in achieving partial suffrage for women: school suffrage laws were passed in several states; Michigan, Kansas, and New York permitted property-owning women to cast ballots on financial issues; and the city of Annapolis rewrote its charter to permit female taxpayers to vote. (See Tables A.17 and A.18.) Yet even on this limited front, setbacks were common: most legislative proposals for school and municipal suffrage were defeated; California’s governor vetoed as unconstitutional an 1899 bill that would have granted municipal and school board suffrage; legislatures debated but uniformly rejected bills to permit women to vote in presidential elections; and the courts in several states, including Michigan and New Jersey, ruled that partial suffrage bills violated state constitutions.52

  The paucity of victories had multiple sources. As was true before 1890, the social base of the women’s movement remained limited, despite the addition of some upper-class recruits. Well into the twentieth century, for example, the nation’s women’s clubs declined to endorse the cause of suffrage. Similarly, traditional gender ideology remained strong, reinforced by religious world views that were resistant to social change. In Delaware in 1897, for example, delegate Edward G. Bradford insisted that enfranchisement would “strike a blow at the harmony . . . of the home” and at “the Christian civilization of the nineteenth century.” His colleague, Wilson T. Cavender, expressed his belief that women possessed a “maternal duty imposed by the law of nature” and “by that duty God has placed an obstacle in the way of their becoming a part and parcel of a Government.” In addition, liquor interests as well as businessmen opposed to social reform once again mounted effective campaigns against enfranchisement, particularly after they were alerted by the victories of the mid-1890s that women’s suffrage could win.53

  Undergirding and perhaps outweighing all of these factors, however, was the conservative reluctance to expand the franchise at all, the distrust of democracy that reached its emotional peak precisely during the “doldrums.” “Tory anti-suffragism,” as historian Sara Graham aptly dubbed such sentiments (to distinguish them from traditional antisuffrage views, grounded in notions of feminine ideals and separate spheres), was gaining strength with each passing year. In 1897, Carrie Chapman Catt, addressing Delaware’s constitutional convention, noted that “there is growing in this country a great skepticism concerning man suffrage. If that were not true, our own cause of woman suffrage would grow more rapidly than it is growing.” The following year, Mary Jo Adams, an early historian of suffrage, wrote thatthe day has passed when the incapacity of women for political duties was maintained; and the opposition today seems not so much against women as against any more voters at all. Suffrage is not an “inalienable right” of the citizen, of the tax-payer or of anybody else. It exists for the good of the State and whatever is for its best interests is right. . . . The advocates of the measure claim that government would be better if women had a participation in it. The opponents say that woman suffrage would merely add to the number of votes, already unmanageably large, without vitally affecting results.

  Adams’s observation was astute. In the South, the statistical argument was simply no match for the frenzied political circus that was disfranchising blacks and poor whites in one state after another. Meanwhile, in the North, the parallel push for suffrage for educated women collided head-on with the powerful middle- and upper-class desire to shrink the electorate. As Abraham Kellogg put it at the New York Constitutional Convention of 1894, “before we double twice over the voting population . . . with its untold possibilities of corruption,” the state ought to “bend its efforts towards purifying the Augean stables which we now have to contend with rather than to incur the possibility of new evils which we know not of.” By 1901, the aging Susan B. Anthony, a witness to a half century of struggle, concluded that one of the three “great obstacles to the speedy enfranchisement of women” was “the inertia in the growth of democracy which has come as a reaction following the aggressive movements that with possibly ill-advised haste enfranchised the foreigner, the negro, and the Indian.”54

  Whatever its statistical validity, the anti-black, anti-immigrant, and anti-working class argument in favor of women’s suffrage was inescapably weakened by its own internal contradictions. Voicing the argu
ment at all meant jeopardizing or forgoing the political support of large groups of actual and potential voters; it also implicitly sanctioned the antifeminist view that voting was not a right and that the franchise could legitimately be restricted by the state. An antidemocratic argument in favor of enlarging the franchise could neither overwhelm nor outflank the simpler, more consistent conservative view that the polity should be as narrowly circumscribed as possible.

  A Mass Movement

  Even as the doldrums dragged on, organizational and ideological shifts were under way that would soon change the movement’s direction and fortunes; the first decade of the twentieth century proved to be less a period of failure than of fruitful stock-taking and coalition building. Under the leadership of Catt and Blatch, among others, NAWSA continued to systematize its organization, while adopting tactics pioneered by British suffragists and the political left. Equally important was the formation of new, more militant organizations, such as the Equality League (1907) and later the Congressional Union (1913) and the Woman’s Party (1916), led by Alice Paul, a highly educated Quaker social worker. Paul, who had traveled to England to study as a young woman, served an apprenticeship in militance with British suffragists, including participation in a hunger strike that had terminated only when she was fed by force.

  Both in and out of NAWSA, the movement became more tightly run, better funded, and more militant in the decade beginning in 1905: suffrage organizations implanted themselves in towns, cities, wards, and precincts throughout the country; they imaginatively generated attention-getting demonstrations of strength; and they pressured political leaders in Washington and the states. In New York, the Woman Suffrage Party adopted Tammany Hall’s techniques of precinct-level organizing; in California, the Equal Suffrage Association canvassed door to door and distributed millions of pamphlets. A steady increase in the number of educated urban women helped to swell the ranks of suffragists.55

  At the same time, the movement became socially and ideologically more diverse, attracting both elite and working-class supporters to complement its middle-class base. The addition of the latter was encouraged by increasingly audible progressive voices, by the movement’s growing interest in social reform and receptivity to working-class women. The turning point for NAWSA came at its 1906 convention, at which child-labor reformer Florence Kelley sharply attacked the movement’s class and ethnic prejudices. “I have rarely heard a ringing suffrage speech which did not refer to the ‘ignorant and degraded’ men, or the ‘ignorant immigrants’ as our masters. This is habitually spoken with more or less bitterness. But this is what the workingmen are used to hear applied to themselves by their enemies in times of strike.” Urging her fellow suffragists to abandon such language, Kelley called for a renewed commitment to social reform, particularly compulsory education and child-labor laws. Her views were seconded at the convention by settlement house pioneer Jane Addams, who grounded a call for enfranchisement in the observation that the governance of modern cities was largely a matter of “housekeeping” that required the particular talents and experiences of women. Notably, Addams also seized the occasion to debunk the notion that women should be excluded from voting because they did not bear arms: although that notion may have had “a certain logic” in medieval cities that were constantly at war, it was irrelevant in a world where the welfare of the city was threatened not by military attack but by social, industrial, and medical problems.56

  Not all suffragists embraced the progressive views of Kelley and Addams, but many did, and the tactical failure of the tilt toward xenophobia and elitism was apparent to all. As a result, the movement shifted direction once again, became more inclusive (at least of whites), and more openly identified with social reform. After 1906, calls for educated suffrage became less frequent, and in 1909, NAWSA formally reversed its support of education qualifications for voting. Linked to the growing concern with social reform, moreover, was a new stress on the economic roles and needs of women. “It is with woman as a worker that the suffrage has to do,” observed Harriot Stanton Blatch, one of the key architects of this ideological turn. Although Blatch wrote extensively about the economic importance of household labor, it was the size and nature of the paid female labor force that buttressed the claim that working women had a particularly compelling need to be enfranchised. By 1900, roughly one fifth of the labor force was female, and many of these women held poorly paid, semiskilled jobs; in 1905, there were 50,000 women in New York’s garment industry alone. As activists tried to impress on politicians and on the middle-class public, women were not a transient presence in industry, and they therefore needed to wield political power in order to protect themselves. “No one needs all the powers of the fullest citizenship more urgently than the wage-earning woman,” Florence Kelley had declared in 1898.57

  This new emphasis on working women had both ideological and pragmatic attractions for suffragists. Female workers were, in the words of historian Nancy Cott, admirable “exemplars of independent womanhood”; they also were vulnerable and exploited victims of industrial capitalism whose plight readily tapped the broad impulses of Progressive-era social reform. Moreover, to stress the needs of working women was to treat them tacitly as an interest group, an ideological reconfiguration that (as Cott has pointed out) fused essentialist and egalitarian claims. Finally, some suffragists, such as Blatch, Kelley, Addams, Anna Howard Shaw, and New York settlement house founder Lillian Wald, believed that suffrage would never be achieved until it had gained the electoral support of working-class men—which meant emphasizing class as well as gender issues. The defeat of a 1912 suffrage referendum in Ohio was widely attributed to the lack of labor support .58

  Meanwhile, working women themselves, as well as their activist leaders, displayed new interest in acquiring the right to vote. This arose in part because of their difficulty unionizing and winning workplace conflicts: although the number of organized women workers was on the rise, progress was slow, and many women were losing faith in the leadership of male trade unionists. More important, female wage earners, in and out of the labor movement, were increasingly convinced that state intervention could ameliorate their working conditions and that such intervention would be forthcoming only if they were enfranchised. Despite their early skepticism about the significance of suffrage, many women workers and their supporters—most notably those who belonged to the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a cross-class organization founded in 1902 to promote the unionization of women—came to believe that enfranchisement was the key to the passage of legislation that would improve the wages, hours, health, and workplace safety of women. “Behind suffrage,” organizer Leonora O’Reilly declared, “is the demand for equal pay for equal work.” Some WTUL activists went a step further, concluding that women’s lack of political power was the critical source of their economic exploitation. “The disfranchised worker is always the lowest paid,” insisted a WTUL resolution presented to the New York State Federation of Labor in 1914. “Working women must use the ballot in order to abolish the burning and crushing of our bodies for the profit of a very few,” lamented a garment worker after a fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory killed more than one hundred women. Similarly, black women—a disproportionate number of whom held working-class jobs—became increasingly engaged in the struggle for suffrage.59

  Not surprisingly, the engagement of working-class women was accompanied by the strengthening of trade union and socialist support. The American Federation of Labor had endorsed women’s suffrage as early as 1892, but its support was tepid until the WTUL and other suffrage organizations began to appeal to working-class interests. By 1915, even the politically cautious AFL president, Samuel Gompers, formally asked all trade unionists to offer active support to the suffrage movement. “There are two tremendous movements for freedom at the present time,” Gompers wrote in an official AFL bulletin, “the labor movement and the woman suffrage movement. . . . Men must join the women in the effort to solve their common problem,
or else they will find women used against them as competitors.” Similarly, Socialists had long endorsed suffrage in principle, and their leader, Eugene V. Debs, had been an unflagging supporter, but it was only after 1910 that Socialists began to campaign vigorously for the ballot. Although support from labor and Socialists drew fire (albeit a rather self-satisfied fire) from antisuffragists, those movements helped to invigorate the suffrage drive while also serving as a training ground for organizers.60

  Thanks in part to this convergence of working-class interest in suffrage with the suffragists’ interest in the working class, the campaign for women’s suffrage became a mass movement for the first time in its history after 1910. Not coincidentally, the movement also began to win some new victories. Washington permitted women to vote in 1910, followed by California in 1911, and Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon the following year; Illinois, in 1913, decided to allow women to vote in presidential elections and for all state and local offices not provided for in its constitution; and the next year, Montana and Nevada adopted full suffrage. In 1912, Congress expressly authorized the territory of Alaska to enfranchise women if its legislature so chose. (See Tables A.19 and A.20.)

  A large and geographically variable roster of factors contributed to these successes: among them were imaginative organizing techniques, persuasive and charismatic leadership (notably, Jeannette Rankin in Montana), the strength of the Progressive Party and the progressive wing of the Republican Party, increasing support among Democrats, the appeal of social reform endeavors linked to women’s suffrage, and the persistence of prohibitionist sentiment (coupled with the persistent prohibitionist campaigns of some suffragists). Yet even in the western states, far from the densely populated immigrant cities of the East and Midwest, the shift in working-class sentiment played a key role. In Washington, suffrage was supported by the state federation of labor, and a straw poll revealed that union members overwhelmingly favored the referendum. In California, where the margin of victory was slight, a sharp rise in the prosuffrage working-class vote proved to be critical. Although women’s suffrage was defeated in the San Francisco area (and received its greatest support in rural counties), an energetic working-class suffrage organization, the Wage Earners’ Suffrage League, helped to substantially increase the prosuffrage vote in working-class districts: from 25 percent in the unsuccessful referendum of 1896 to more than 40 percent in 1911. The working class, in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, was more favorably disposed to suffrage than were either the middle classes or the urban elite.61