The Woman's Hour

by Elaine Weiss

  From that time on, Woodrow Wilson never refused Carrie Catt’s appeals for help. “My Dear Mrs. Catt,” was his salutation in his notes to her. Even if he could not manage (or, as some said, did not try hard enough) to fulfill her requests, twist the right arms, translate his pledges into action, he always promised her he would try. And when the amendment remained stuck in the Senate in September 1918, Catt prevailed upon Wilson to make a direct appeal in the Senate chamber.

  Wilson made the argument that woman suffrage was a “spiritual instrument” he needed, “vital to the winning of the war.” Women deserved the franchise, there was no longer any question: “We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”

  The senators took huffy offense—no president had ever made a personal appearance in their chamber to push for legislation—and they ignored Wilson’s entreaties. The very next day, the Senate humiliated him by rejecting the amendment again, two Democratic votes shy of passage.

  President Wilson fell ill just when Carrie Catt needed him most. She’d been counting on his help during the fall of 1919 to secure ratification of the amendment in states where governors or legislatures were being stubborn or slow, where a note or call from the White House might do the trick. Like the rest of the country, she didn’t know how sick the president really was, nor did she realize that her pleas for help were probably being routed through Mrs. Wilson. She was saved by White House secretary Joseph Tumulty, a suffragist, who did his best to take Catt’s missives directly to the president when he could, sidestepping Mrs. Wilson or even handling the matter himself, as he assumed the task of writing many of the president’s more routine statements and letters. So Catt’s requests for presidential letters were faithfully dispatched, and that telegram urging Governor Roberts to convene a special session in Tennessee was put through promptly. But if President Wilson considered the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and the enfranchisement of American women to be a significant part of his legacy, it was not part of the discussion with his political heirs.

  * * *

  After their hour with the president, Cox and Roosevelt walked to the executive wing of the White House, where Cox put his newspaperman’s skills to good use, quickly jotting down a statement for release to the press. “From every viewpoint the meeting was delightful,” Cox scribbled. “I found the President in splendid shape and I was most agreeably surprised by his condition,” he lied to the sixty journalists gathered for an impromptu press conference. After lunch with the candidates and Edith, Tumulty, and Grayson, Wilson dictated his own press statement to his stenographer: “Governor Cox and I were absolutely at one on the great issue of the League of Nations.”

  Unity was the theme of the day. There was no mention of enfranchisement, nothing about ratification, nor was there any strategic discussion of the prospect of twenty-seven million women headed to the polls in November. Or not. Carrie Catt feared she knew why. There were what she called “sinister forces” at work. There might be no tail and no kite.

  Chapter 8

  On Account of Sex

  CARRIE CATT DID NOT bring her sapphire-blue battlefield uniform, her ratification dress, to Nashville. It was the dress she’d ordered to celebrate passage of the federal suffrage amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives in early 1918. That blue dress was Catt’s sartorial symbol of the amendment, her shout of confidence in the ultimate—however maddeningly delayed—triumph of the Cause.

  In one of those odd quirks of fate, the federal amendment began to be forged on the very day that young Carrie had awakened to the woman suffrage issue. On Election Day morning 1872, when Carrie first felt the slap of political exclusion in her mother’s kitchen, she didn’t know that at that very moment hundreds of other women were also pounding on the closed doors of the American polling place.

  That same morning in Rochester, New York, Susan Anthony calmly walked into her local polling place and broke the law by dropping a paper ballot into a wooden box. She brought along her three sisters and about a dozen of her local suffrage club friends; the election registrars weren’t sure what to do. She convinced them that voting was women’s legal right as citizens. The women were permitted to cast their ballots.

  “Well I have been & gone & done it,” Anthony gleefully wrote to her suffrage collaborator Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “Positively voted the Republican ticket—strait this a.m. at 7 Oclock—& swore my vote in at that.”

  Anthony was experimenting with a new legal strategy to win the vote, a concept called the New Departure, which relied on a novel reading of the Fourteenth Amendment and a nervy bid to test the interpretation. If that amendment, enshrined as law in the U.S. Constitution four years before, defined all native-born or naturalized persons as American citizens and accorded those citizens “privileges and immunities” that could not be denied by the states, then women—who were persons, who were citizens—must enjoy those same privileges, including the franchise. It was simple: American women already possessed the right to vote, it was there in the Constitution, and women simply needed to exercise that right. A group of 170 New Jersey suffragists had tried the ploy in 1868; their ballots were placed in a separate box and not counted.

  The plan, coordinated by Anthony and Stanton’s infant organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association, was to get suffragists all over the country to attempt to vote in the presidential election of 1872. If the women were refused at the polls, lawsuits would be filed against the local election board and, hopefully, the cases would be carried all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Like many civil rights activists to follow, they were provoking a legal test case.

  So on the first Tuesday of November 1872, more than 150 women around the country, including Susan Anthony, her sisters, and her friends, did attempt to vote. In St. Louis, Missouri, a suffrage worker named Virginia Minor had tried to register to vote, but the election clerk refused her; she and her husband filed suit against the registrar. And in Battle Creek, Michigan, a former slave and political activist known as Sojourner Truth went to her local polling station to vote, but she was turned away.

  Truth was a veteran of the abolition and suffrage meeting circuits, mesmerizing audiences with her powerful testimonies to the indignities she suffered being both black and female. It is reported that at an 1851 women’s rights meeting in Akron she famously challenged her white audience—“Ar’n’t I a Woman?”—a question that would haunt the suffrage movement for years to come. For Truth, and all the other women who took part in this action of mass civil disobedience, the consequences they faced, including heavy fines, public rebuke, and possibly prison, paled in comparison with the thrill of demanding a ballot and taking the law into their own hands.

  Susan Anthony and her cohorts were arrested by a deputy U.S. marshal and charged with “illegal voting” in a federal election, a criminal offense. As the most celebrated of the electoral scofflaws, Anthony was made an example by nervous government officials eager to quash this voting nonsense. She asked to be handcuffed and refused to post the $500 bail; she wanted to go to jail, all the better for publicity and legal maneuvering to a higher court. One of her lawyers, over her protests, paid her bail out of his own pocket. While awaiting trial, she set off on a headline-grabbing tour through every district in her home county, attracting large and sympathetic audiences to her fiery presentation, asking, “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?” When prosecutors noticed that Anthony’s performances might influence potential jurors, they moved her trial to another county. Undaunted, Anthony took to the platforms there; she made fifty speeches in all. Her trial, in U.S. district court, was a sensation, covered daily by the national press, just as she’d hoped.

  Judge Ward Hunt, soon to take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, would not allow Anthony to testify on her own behalf, and when the arguments of the prosecutors and defense
lawyers concluded, Hunt pulled his written opinion from his pocket, obviously drafted before hearing any of the evidence of the case. He directed the men of the jury to bring in a verdict of guilty and refused to poll them on their decision; when Anthony’s attorney protested, Judge Hunt discharged the jury. Before sentencing her, Judge Hunt asked if “the prisoner” had anything to say. He got an earful:

  “Yes, your honor, I have many things to say,” Anthony blasted, “for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this so-called republican form of government.”

  “The Court orders the prisoner to sit down,” Judge Hunt snapped. She refused and continued. “It will not allow another word,” the judge bellowed. Exasperated, he finally imposed the sentence: a fine of $100, plus court costs, or face imprisonment, though authorities had second thoughts about allowing her to become a jailed, noisy martyr. She wasn’t jailed, never paid the fine, and there was no attempt to collect it. Anthony was unable to pursue her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Virginia Minor did.

  Minor’s husband, Francis, a lawyer, filed a suit on her behalf (because women couldn’t initiate lawsuits) against the election registrar, maintaining that Missouri’s laws prohibiting women from voting were unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. Rebuffed in the lower courts, the Minors appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Francis Minor pleaded the case to the justices himself. The court ruled against them, saying that women were a special category of nonvoting citizens—“members of the state,” was the term used. The high court held that despite the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges and immunities clause, a state can prohibit women from voting. The ruling dashed any hopes that suffrage could be won through the courts, and by allowing a state to withhold the franchise from a whole class of citizens, the decision would lay the foundation for Jim Crow voter exclusions for nearly another century.

  The failed voting experiments of 1872, coupled with the U.S. Supreme Court defeat, forced Anthony and Stanton to reevaluate their strategies. Trying to change voting laws in every state, one by one, would take forever. So they renewed the idea of their own amendment to the federal Constitution, one that would correct the omissions of the post–Civil War Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, when women were left out of the extension of the franchise to black men. It would supplant that malevolent phrase “male citizen” sneaked into the Fourteenth and add those three vital little letters “s-e-x” into the Fifteenth’s list of reasons why an American citizen could not be denied the right to vote. A Sixteenth Amendment, an explicit woman suffrage amendment, became the primary goal of their new National Woman Suffrage Association, while its rival, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell’s American Woman Suffrage Association, chose to pursue change state by state.

  Anthony and Stanton drafted and refined the wording of this new amendment, boiling it down to a single sentence, using the template of the Fifteenth Amendment, and leaving no room for legal ambiguity: “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.”

  They found their champion in Congress in Senator Aaron Augustus Sargent of California. Anthony had befriended the Sargent family on a train stranded in snowdrifts in the Rockies, and in the long hours trapped in the railroad car, she and the Sargents shared food and talked suffrage. Sargent became a trusted friend and advocate, withstanding the ridicule of his colleagues, and introduced the amendment into the Senate on January 10, 1878. It was referred to the Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections for consideration.

  It sat in Congress for the next forty years.

  The amendment was reintroduced into every succeeding Congress, only to promptly disappear into the dark recesses of various committee file cabinets. It was allowed to surface briefly from time to time for hearings, where Stanton, Anthony, and other suffrage stateswomen were allowed to make their carefully reasoned arguments, only to be subjected to crass ridicule by the lawmakers. Stanton reported that during her testimony at one such hearing, the presiding senator clipped his fingernails, sharpened his pencils, and read the newspaper rather than pay attention; she said she had to restrain herself from throwing her manuscript at his head. Then the amendment would be tabled for another year.

  Carrie was in college when the amendment was introduced into Congress, and it had confronted its first Senate vote, a two-to-one defeat, in 1887, just as she joined the suffrage movement as a field organizer in Iowa. It had been stuck in Congress for a dozen years when she caught the eye of Susan Anthony, always on the lookout for young talent, at the 1890 National American Suffrage Association convention.

  The amendment had already been tabled by Senate and House committees ten times at the opening of the 1892 NAWSA convention in Washington, when Susan Anthony invited Catt to join the suffragists’ annual trek to Congress. Anthony assigned her to be the first to testify for the amendment—obviously a test—and Catt had to think fast and speak off-the-cuff. It was her congressional debut, but only the first of scores of futile, infuriating trips to the Hill.

  There was little progress during the latter 1890s while Catt became one of Aunt Susan’s apprentices. With the amendment trapped in Congress, Anthony led her “Girls” into a series of punishing state campaigns, to alter constitutions or put the question of woman suffrage to popular referenda, in which, of course, only men had a say. There were a few victories—Colorado in 1893, Utah in 1896—and many more bitter defeats.

  The amendment had been marooned in Congress for a generation, twenty-two years, when an aged Susan Anthony brought Catt onto the stage of the 1900 NAWSA convention and introduced her as her successor, confident that Catt had the skill and the passion to lead the movement. Catt also had the financial security of a prosperous and supportive husband—something many of the other contenders, including Anna Shaw, did not enjoy—enabling her to take on the unsalaried presidency. Catt tried to both shake up and shore up the National Association, emphasizing solid organizational structure and more centralized control, while also shifting the image of suffragism from radical to respectable by recruiting more professional and society women into the ranks. Now it was Carrie Catt leading the annual delegations to the Hill on behalf of the amendment, but Congress did not even consider the amendment during her first four-year administration.

  After she stepped down from the presidency in 1905, and Anna Shaw stepped up, neither the Senate nor the House reported on the amendment in committee or considered it on the floor for almost another full decade, a maddening period some called the Doldrums. Shaw was a great evangelist but a poor administrator, and she lost control of the National Association. Into this void stepped Alice Paul, a twenty-eight-year-old Quaker woman from New Jersey with a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and several years’ experience with Emmeline Pankhurst’s corps in England, willing to undertake violent protests and suffer prison to make their point. The amendment had been gathering dust for thirty-five years when Paul and her fellow Pankhurst veteran Lucy Burns returned to the United States and took charge of the National Association’s congressional lobbying office, with plans to blast it out of its lethargy. That they did, but in the process they almost blasted the American suffrage movement apart, too. Or propelled it forward, depending upon one’s point of view.

  By 1915, with Paul making headlines for her provocative actions and siphoning off some of the most talented Suffs to her breakaway faction, the officers of NAWSA were desperate for Anna Shaw to retire and for Carrie Catt to retake the helm. Catt reluctantly assumed the presidency again just as the world war posed both a great human catastrophe a
nd a great political opportunity for the movement. Everyone was forced to make sacrifices: women gave their husbands, sons, and brothers; Alice Paul gave her body, tortured in jail; Carrie Catt gave her soul, joining the war effort she detested.

  Almost a year after America entered the world war, on January 10, 1918, both Carrie Catt and Alice Paul sat anxiously in the House galleries as the chamber voted on the amendment. Just the day before, Woodrow Wilson had finally announced his support for the amendment and urged Democratic congressmen to vote for it; whether Wilson was influenced more by Paul’s castigating or Catt’s cajoling remains a matter of debate.

  Everyone knew the vote would be close. One congressman, a suffrage supporter, was wheeled in on a gurney, defying his doctor’s orders to remain in the hospital; another took his seat with a broken shoulder, refusing to have it set despite the pain, lest the anesthetic make him dopey. It brought tears to the eyes of the Suffs in the House gallery to see Representative Frederick Hicks of New York appear on the floor, ashen-faced, having left his wife’s deathbed, at her insistence, to vote for the amendment. He returned home for her funeral. The drama on the House floor was surpassed only by the harrowing tension of the roll call: the amendment passed the two-thirds majority threshold by a single vote. Catt and her suffrage sisters left the Capitol building crying and singing hymns of joy.

  Despite the dangerously thin cushion, Carrie was certain that congressional victory, after forty exasperating years, was near. The Senate would surely speed its consideration and approval of the amendment, and the elaborate plans she’d drawn for the ratification campaigns in every state could be launched before spring 1918. The Great War was still raging, austerity was the byword, but Catt, in a burst of girlish enthusiasm, ordered her ratification dress to wear as she stumped in the states. Her friend Helen Gardener, one of the National Association’s chief lobbyists in Washington, warned her—“You can’t hustle the Senate”—but Carrie went ahead and had the dress fashioned in her favorite color.