by Elaine Weiss
Even Carrie Catt was sending encouraging signals to him as she branded Warren Harding’s refusal to push the Republican governors of Vermont and Connecticut to call special sessions unacceptable.
“It is true that the Republican party has a record of nearly five times as many ratifications as the Democratic,” Catt told reporters, “but without the 36th state that record is like a great tail without a kite. Apparently it is the Democrats who must supply the kite.”
Cox knew that Tennessee offered him a shining opportunity to provide that kite and a chance to reset the national map of ratification, giving Democrats a boost. He didn’t like poking his nose into another governor’s business, and Governor Roberts was certainly in a sticky spot, but he would try his best to gently nudge the governor and the Democratic legislature to sew up ratification of the amendment. Get all those women on board for November, thankful to Democrats. This was Cox’s presidential moment, his time to lead the party—and, with luck, to lead the nation—and he didn’t want anything to spoil it.
The Democrats tapped the brash young assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to be Cox’s running mate. Roosevelt brought attractive attributes to the ticket that Cox lacked: a famous name, Ivy League connections, buoyant energy, and—in anticipation of at least some women voting in the presidential election, whether or not the federal amendment was ratified in time to give all women the ballot—good looks and gregarious charm. He sure beat the Republican VP candidate, Calvin Coolidge, in that department, the Democratic power brokers chortled.
Democrats also hoped he would appeal to woman suffragists, who counted FDR as a dependable friend. He liked to claim that he’d been converted to the Cause in 1911, when he was a novice New York state senator and the sultry suffrage activist Inez Milholland came to his office to lobby him in support of a proposed suffrage amendment to the state constitution. Roosevelt had been ducking the suffrage question, claiming his conservative Hudson Valley district wasn’t much for it, so he couldn’t commit. The way Roosevelt liked to tell it, Milholland, the suffrage movement’s most glamorous crusader, a brilliant Vassar grad with a law degree who was soon to become famous for leading suffrage parades astride a white horse, sat on his desk and “dazzled him” with her legal and moral arguments for suffrage. She convinced him that suffrage was “the only chivalric position for a decent man to hold.”
Whether or not that was the true or whole story (and his wife, Eleanor, did not like that version of events, disputing the singular persuasive power of “that memorable visit”), FDR came out for woman suffrage and his wife was flabbergasted by his new stance. “I was shocked,” she would later confess, “as I had never given the question serious thought, for I took it for granted that men were superior creatures and knew more about politics than women did.” Eleanor wasn’t “violently opposed” to woman suffrage, as some biographers have inferred, she’d simply absorbed the women’s proper sphere rationales still prevalent in her family and social set. And as the wife of an up-and-coming politician, she didn’t think she should have political opinions of her own. Even after New York women won suffrage in 1917, Eleanor did not exercise her franchise, declining to accompany Franklin to the polls at Hyde Park in the fall 1918 elections.
Edith Wilson also didn’t approve of enfranchising women and made no bones about it. Her hostility toward the idea of woman suffrage had only hardened as she watched zealous women make spectacles of themselves in the streets, trying to intimidate—to humiliate—her husband. She despised those picketers.
A stance in favor of women’s political equality did not come naturally to Woodrow Wilson, either, a Presbyterian minister’s son with a conservative Virginian upbringing. Wilson was raised with reverence for the southern traditions of True Womanhood, and he placed his mother, wife (both first and second), and three daughters on proper pedestals. He adored the women in his life and needed them to adore and coddle him. But his women were meant to be comforters and confidantes, not colleagues, and not fellow citizens participating in the life of the nation.
Wilson was a scholar of American democracy and a hands-on practitioner of the American political system. He served as president of Princeton University and governor of New Jersey at a time when woman suffrage was being hotly debated in intellectual circles and fiercely contested in many state campaigns. But for most of his public career, Woodrow Wilson tried to avoid the issue of women’s equal suffrage as best he could. When pressed, he admitted: “I must say very frankly that my personal judgment is strongly against it. I believe that the social changes it would involve would not justify the gains that would be accomplished by it.”
As Wilson eyed a run for the White House in 1912, knowing he needed to attract a broader constituency—including the women of nine western states who already enjoyed the franchise and could vote in both state and federal elections—he modified his suffrage stance somewhat. Even as Teddy Roosevelt’s third-party Progressives beat the drum for woman suffrage in the 1912 presidential campaign, Wilson managed to sidestep the issue, saying it wasn’t a national matter, but purely a state decision and not within the purview of a presidential candidate. This placed him in a safe zone with the base of his party, the southern “states’ rights” Democrats who feared a coercive federal amendment.
Wilson was confronted by the suffrage question even before he could take his oath of office. If he’d managed to duck the issue in the campaign, Alice Paul, the new director of NAWSA’s lobbying department, the Congressional Committee, made sure he could ignore it no longer. To draw attention to the issue, Paul organized a huge suffrage parade through Washington on the day before Wilson’s inauguration, March 3, 1913. More than five thousand marchers from every state—led by Inez Milholland on her white horse—stepped down Pennsylvania Avenue, accompanied by bands and elaborate floats. Carrie Catt and Anna Howard Shaw marched, too. Eleanor Roosevelt, in Washington to join the inauguration festivities (her husband had just won a Wilson political appointment), watched the parade go by: “The suffrage parade was too funny,” she wrote to a friend, “and nice fat ladies with bare legs and feet posed in tableaux on the Treasury steps!”
Washington had never seen anything like it, and some spectators definitely didn’t like it. The marchers were attacked by mobs of irate men and boys, outraged by the sight of women demanding their rights in so public a fashion. Women were grabbed off floats, thrown to the ground, their banners pulled from their hands and smashed, their clothes ripped. The police stood by and didn’t intervene, leaving the marchers unprotected. Federal troops from a nearby base had to be called in to restore order. The march, and the melee, made headlines around the country on the day Woodrow Wilson put his hand on the Bible.
Within the next months Wilson was bombarded with pleas, petitions, processions, automobile caravans, and other novel types of agitation—organized by the very insistent Miss Paul—to convince him of the popular demand for woman suffrage and the need for a federal amendment. He responded with a confusing mix of evasion and equivocation. Ever the astute politician, even while he dissembled, Wilson kept track of the shifting political winds and the changing popular attitudes on the woman suffrage question. Even when state suffrage referenda were defeated, the number of aye ballots cast by men was growing larger. The number of senators and representatives sent to Washington by suffrage states, and so answerable to both men and women voters, made up a small but not insignificant proportion of the Congress. The number of women whose states allowed them presidential suffrage—who could vote for, or against, him in the 1916 election—was nothing to sneeze at. But still he waffled.
Wilson believed that suffrage for women would be a disaster for the American home, and he was determined to defend men’s castles. His own home was mostly a happy one; his first wife, the sweet and selfless Ellen, doted on her husband. She was a southern social conservative who saw no need for women to tromp into a polling booth to vote for her husband or
anyone else. The Wilsons allowed their daughters to go off to college, though the girls had to convince their mother that higher education would not make them “unfeminine.”
When Ellen died in the middle of Woodrow’s first term, he was bereft and despondent. But just six months after Ellen’s death, he became smitten with a beautiful and vivacious widow, Edith Bolling Galt. He proposed to her within weeks of first setting eyes on her. His aides worried that the public would think it unseemly for him to marry so soon after Ellen’s death, and voters (especially those western women who had the vote) might punish him when he ran for reelection. Wilson announced his engagement to Edith in early October 1915 and on the very same day declared his intention to travel home to Princeton to cast his ballot in favor of woman suffrage in the New Jersey referendum later that month. “I believe that the time has come to extend that privilege and responsibility to the women of the State,” he declared, emphasizing that he was voting not as the leader of his party, or as the leader of the nation, but as a private citizen who believed that woman suffrage was a matter to be decided by each state, not foisted on them by Congress.
Wilson knew the New Jersey referendum was safely doomed, but the move was symbolic, part of his reelection strategy to win back disaffected progressive voters who’d been alienated by some of his first-term decisions (including imposing racial segregation in the federal civil service) while mollifying those western women voters and winning points with eastern suffragists. And this new suffrage stance might even protect him from any negative fallout from his remarriage.
Carrie Catt, then leader of the Empire State campaign to win the franchise for New York women in the same 1915 election, immediately sent a telegram of thanks to the president: “On behalf of a million women in NYS who have declared they want the ballot, please accept my gratitude for your announcement that you will vote for the woman suff amend in NJ.” She hoped Wilson’s coattails might extend across the Hudson and help her win the New York referendum. His coattails were threadbare; the male voters of both states, as well as those in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, voted woman suffrage down.
Alice Paul, now leader of a breakaway suffrage organization, the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (which would later be renamed the National Woman’s Party), was much less impressed with the president’s intentions. With his pledge to vote in New Jersey, he also repudiated the federal amendment in favor of a doomed state-by-state approach. Paul intended to hold Wilson and all Democrats responsible for the failure of the federal suffrage amendment to progress one inch in Congress during his first term. She announced the Congressional Union would actively campaign against Wilson’s reelection in the western suffrage states and against the reelection of all Democratic congressmen and senators, whether or not they supported woman suffrage. Paul and her followers would punish the party in power, just as her mentor Mrs. Pankhurst had done in England; it was a promise she intended to keep.
With the White House announcement that the president was remarrying and voting for woman suffrage, the press took the coincidence of the two statements as evidence that the soon-to-be new Mrs. Wilson had transformed the president into a Suff. “The joke is that she’s against it,” Cary Grayson reported to a friend, “but she’s too good a diplomat to say anything on the subject these days.”
Edith Bolling Galt was certainly no Suff. Like Woodrow, she was a proud Virginian, claiming to be a direct descendant of Pocahontas; her grandparents owned slaves. She was clever and opinionated, though she admitted she’d paid no attention to national or political affairs until she met Woodrow. A stickler for propriety, the tall, blue-eyed widow had definite ideas about a woman’s proper role (it was to cherish and support her husband), but she had no problem assuming control of her late husband’s lucrative jewelry business and no qualms about showing off her independence and driving prowess as the first woman to hold a driver’s license in the District of Columbia, zipping around town in her own open-top electric car.
Wilson married Edith on December 18, 1915, in a private ceremony at her Washington town house. Just blocks away at the Willard Hotel, the suffragists of the National American Woman Suffrage Association were celebrating the election of Carrie Catt as their new president, drafted (she might say dragooned) into leadership once again at a time of crisis for the movement. The day after the wedding, as the president and his bride embarked on their honeymoon, two of their wedding guests, the president’s daughter Margaret and his cousin Helen Woodrow Bones (who had stepped in as official White House hostess when Ellen died), sat on the stage with Carrie Catt, in places of honor, at the National Association’s convention rally.
And in a basement office on F Street, Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the officers of the Congressional Union—their split with NAWSA having been made final during that week’s convention—sketched their plans to go their separate way: maneuver around Carrie Catt and the suffrage establishment and defeat Woodrow Wilson.
Along with an expensive trousseau, Edith brought her antipathy toward woman suffrage to the White House, so it was painful for her to sit through her husband’s effort to woo the women of NAWSA during his reelection campaign in the summer of 1916. While Alice Paul and her followers were campaigning against Wilson, Carrie Catt saw Wilson as a potential, persuadable, ally. She invited the president to address a special National Association conference in Atlantic City. The president was escorted to the podium by his wife on one side and Carrie Catt on the other, walking through an honor guard of besashed Suffs from every state, purposely selected for their beauty. (Among them was Tennessee suffragist Anne Dudley.) Edith sat on the podium, “a lovely being to look at,” as one attendee described her, “and as remote, as detached, from that scene as if she had come from another world. As she sat there, her small feet crossed, an invisible line seemed to separate her from all these women. They knew without her having said it that she did not sympathize with them.”
Edith’s distaste for suffrage grew only deeper as Alice Paul’s followers, now organized into the National Woman’s Party, intensified their attacks on her “Precious One,” making them more personal and bitter. When they began picketing the White House in January 1917, with placards imploring “Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait for Liberty,” Edith began calling them “disgusting creatures.” During the war, when those placards lambasted her husband as “Kaiser Wilson,” she railed against “those detestable suffragists.”
When the picketers were arrested for obstructing the sidewalk and thrown into jail, abused, and force-fed, Edith dismissed them as “those demons in the workhouse.” She questioned her husband’s decision to pardon suffrage prisoners in July 1917, a move intended to get the news of their ill-treatment off the front page. Edith wanted the suffrage protesters who’d taunted and embarrassed her husband to serve their time in jail, be taught a proper lesson.
But Edith also witnessed, at close hand, from her favorite window seat in the southwest corner of the White House, how the war altered the national landscape in so many ways: changed circumstances, changed minds. Eventually changed her husband into an advocate for the federal amendment. During the war, as Wilson slowly, hesitantly, made that swing to embrace the amendment, Edith could sense the political forces pressing upon him, the attitudinal shifts he was forced to accommodate. America had a new role in the world, as both the beacon and the guardian of democracy. And Edith also recognized that an element of his change of mind was the debt Woodrow owed to Mrs. Catt, a debt he was honor-bound to repay.
Mrs. Catt had not sent her National Association women to picket the White House, nor did she intervene on behalf of Paul when the young zealot called herself a political prisoner. Most important, Mrs. Catt had helped Woodrow to wage and win the war, bringing the women of America, even the suffragists, to his side.
That had been the most wrenching, and most controversial, decision of her entire life. Carrie Catt, the confirmed pacifist, founding member of the Woman’
s Peace Party, had come around to accepting America’s entry into the war, and even more significant, she had pledged the loyalty and assistance of the two million women affiliated with NAWSA for whatever war work was needed. It was the gamble of an astute, if agonized, suffrage politician. She’d watched her International Woman Suffrage Alliance comrades go through the same torment. When the United Kingdom went to war three years before, all the British suffragists—mainstream and militant, even the Pankhursts—had put aside their demands for the vote to devote themselves to war work: “What’s the use of having a vote if there’s no country to vote in,” Emmeline Pankhurst famously explained.
Catt called an emergency meeting of NAWSA’s executive council, and after tearful debate they approved her suggested policy, calling for suffragists to work simultaneously for the war and for the vote, allowing members to do their war work under the NAWSA banner and prove suffragists’ patriotism. Catt paid a steep personal price for her decision. She was booted out of the Woman’s Peace Party and shunned by her fellow pacifists, who felt she had deserted them. She’d made a Faustian bargain with Woodrow Wilson, they complained; she had bartered her principles for uncertain political gain. She had become a patsy for the warmongers and profiteers. She took the blows silently but vowed that once suffrage was won, she would devote herself to peace and disarmament work for the rest of her life.
But when Woodrow Wilson helped to round up the last votes needed for the amendment’s passage in the House of Representatives in January 1918, Carrie Catt could, and did, take credit for patiently, skillfully, bringing the president around. Just as she’d calculated, American women, by their loyalty and deeds, had earned the vote in the eyes of the president. Alice Paul would insist that credit for the turnaround belonged to her brave, defiant picketers and prisoners, who’d shamed Congress and the president into acknowledging that democracy needed to begin at home. They were both right.
