by Elaine Weiss
Although white women completed their quest for the vote in 1920, other Americans would have to wait. Native Americans finally succeeded in convincing Congress to grant them citizenship and suffrage in 1924, yet many Native Americans continued to be barred from voting by state laws until 1957. Asian Americans, even native born, were not permitted to become citizens or vote until the mid-twentieth century: Chinese Americans were not allowed citizenship or suffrage until 1943; for those of Asian Indian descent, these rights were withheld until 1946; and Japanese Americans were forced to wait until 1952. African Americans in southern states, while possessing suffrage on paper, could not freely exercise their franchise until 1965 and still face obstacles.
It is perhaps telling that in a stubborn stance on states’ rights, some states that had rejected ratification of the amendment waited decades to finally make a symbolic acceptance: though it had no bearing on (white) women’s ability to vote, Maryland did not officially ratify the Nineteenth Amendment until 1958; Mississippi waited until 1984.
By the summer of 1920, twenty-six nations had already granted their women the vote. The postwar surge was due in part to the role women had played in the war (and also the loss of so many men), but it was also thanks in part to Carrie Catt’s International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which had nurtured and connected suffrage groups around the world since 1902. With the U.S. campaign completed, Catt redirected funds from the Miriam Leslie bequest to support suffrage campaigns in other lands. Within the next two decades, more than thirty additional nations adopted woman suffrage. The Suffrage Alliance evolved into the International Alliance of Women, which today is based in Geneva and represents fifty human rights organizations, with several hundred thousand members advocating for women’s equality and protection around the globe.
Following the 1920 election, the women of the American suffrage movement set off in new directions. While Carrie Catt and Maud Wood Park led the women of NAWSA into its successor, the League of Women Voters (already established earlier in 1920) and its mission of nonpartisan voter education and issue advocacy, Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party kept going, with new, ambitious goals. For Paul and her followers, winning suffrage was just the first of many steps toward achieving equal legal, social, and economic rights for women; for them, the fight would go on.
Sue White stayed with the Woman’s Party while she joined the staff of Tennessee senator Kenneth McKellar in Washington and realized her dream of becoming a lawyer, obtaining her law degree in 1923. White applied her legal training to help Alice Paul and Woman’s Party activist Crystal Eastman draft the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)—a constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights under the law and prohibiting discrimination on account of sex—introduced into Congress in 1923.
The ERA split the women’s movement again: it was opposed by labor and social welfare leaders, who feared that even as it guaranteed “equal rights under law,” its adoption would erase hard-won protective regulations for women in the workplace. Carrie Catt and the League of Women Voters opposed the ERA, as did, later on, Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers, and without unified support the ERA floundered in Congress even longer than the woman suffrage amendment had: forty-nine years. It was finally passed by Congress in 1972 but met stiff resistance in the states from social and religious conservatives, led by Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly and her allies deployed some of the same arguments that the Antis had used, warning that the ERA would upset traditional gender roles and endanger the home and family, subjecting women to a range of perils. Like Charlotte Rowe six decades before, Schlafly gleefully debated the demerits of the ERA with “women’s libbers,” and public support for the amendment began to erode.
The ERA has never been ratified. Under public pressure, five states, including Tennessee, actually rescinded their original ratification, and even after a decade of trying, the ERA failed to muster approval of the required number of states. The ERA continues to be reintroduced into each new Congress in hopes of eventual passage and ratification.
There are some who would argue that feminists missed an opportunity to harness the momentum of their suffrage victory by not organizing themselves into a women’s political party that could support women candidates and advocate for women’s issues. Alva Belmont and others within the Woman’s Party urged that it transform itself into a true political party, but the organizational and financial logistics of such an endeavor were too daunting. Instead, Alice Paul dedicated the organization to achieving women’s full equality by changing state and national laws.
Carrie Catt never wavered in her insistence that in order to enact broader change, women must not segregate themselves in a single-sex party, but enter the two dominant political parties and push for change from within. She warned that women should not expect to be warmly welcomed into the parties (even if they might enjoy an initial effusive greeting) or expect to be escorted into the inner circles of party power, but they must be persistent, not patient, and demand a role in decision making. Some women did do this and rose in the parties’ ranks. But as women failed to coalesce into a unified voting bloc in the first decades after enfranchisement, their power within the parties dissipated. Women candidates were rarely nominated (if they were, it was usually as fodder in a hopeless campaign), and for many years women’s issues continued to be given short shrift by both major parties.
In hindsight, some analysts even question the wisdom of channeling women’s political energy and expertise into Catt’s nonpartisan League of Women Voters. While the LWV grew nationwide in membership and respect, and still plays an important role in educating the voting public on crucial issues and advocating for “good government,” it also siphoned off some of the most talented suffrage politicians into the more passive role of political “education” rather than practice.
This is not to say that the suffragists, and their daughters, fell asleep after securing the Nineteenth Amendment, only that they splintered. After the “Votes for Women” umbrella folded, there was nothing to hold together the very broad, diverse coalition that had gathered under it. Suffrage women retreated into their own special interests, organizations, and regional concerns, often taking opposing sides on policy issues. An early attempt to aggregate the new political might of women was the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, formed by suffragists just a few months after ratification in 1920, with the goal of bringing the clout of major women’s organizations to bear on social welfare legislation, employing the suffragists’ lobbying know-how in the halls of Congress. The experiment lasted just a decade, and by the end of the 1920s Carrie Catt bemoaned the lack of a coordinated women’s political movement: the thrill of working for the Cause was gone, the frustration of slow legislative and legal change had set in, and women could not “be joined together for any one purpose,” Catt lamented, “because the difference between the reactionary and the progressive is too great to be bridged.”
The Suffs’ promise of a “women’s vote”—a deliverable voting bloc, with the power to reward or punish elected officials and parties for their stance on a range of issues—never materialized, and as politicians came to realize this, their fear of the woman voter subsided and their eagerness to please her evaporated. Women tended to vote for the party of their husbands or fathers, and women’s turnout at the polls remained surprisingly—and, to former Suffs, distressingly—low. (To be fair, men’s voting participation also lagged.) It was not until the early 1960s that the number of women voting in national elections equaled the number of male voters, and not until 1980 did the percentage of women voters surpass that of men. Since then, women have voted in greater numbers and percentages than men by ever-widening margins, and a politician facing a large “gender gap” in support is often in trouble.
All this was just as the Antis had predicted. Despite their fondness for hyperbole and histrionics, the Antis were actually correct on a number of counts: women did not unite into a cohesive vot
ing coalition; they did not “purify” or elevate politics in any meaningful way or stem the corrupting influence of money and corporate clout; and to Carrie Catt’s deep dismay, women did not demand an end to war and a commitment to organizations promoting peaceful conflict resolution.
Ironically, it was the Antis who grew in power and influence over the next decades, their organizations seamlessly evolving from an antisuffrage movement into an antiradical and anti-Communist crusade. Immediately following ratification, national Anti leader Mary Kilbreth and her lieutenants, including several veterans of the Nashville fight, pivoted from fighting the female franchise to battling “Miss Bolsheviki”—the “radical” women they believed were ushering communism into America through advocacy of pacifism and social welfare programs. Once again, their favorite target was Carrie Catt.
Catt’s commitment to international peace work proved her intent to weaken America through disarmament and dangerous international alliances, Kilbreth and her Woman Patriot comrades maintained; Catt’s creation, the National Committee on the Cause and Cure of War, was nothing more than a Commie front, and her League of Women Voters was directed by Moscow, they alleged. Catt joined an ever-expanding list of American women accused of being unpatriotic, even traitorous, including Hull House social reformer and peace advocate Jane Addams and many other highly respected, politically progressive women. In the pages of Kilbreth’s Woman Patriot publication, now repurposed for the fight against perceived Communists, Catt and Addams were regularly attacked and maligned, and both were featured in the infamous “Spider Web Chart” that drew spurious connections between liberal women activists and Communist operatives. Catt publicly fought back against the “web of lies” and its perpetrators, but the damage was done.
Kilbreth aligned with other conservative women’s groups—including the Daughters of the American Revolution, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and the American Legion Auxiliary—to wage what came to be known as “the Women’s Red Scare.” They managed to tar what were once considered mainstream groups advocating for mother-and-apple-pie issues, such as maternal and child welfare, an end to child labor, consumer education, and public health programs, as radical plots to secretly install a Communist dictatorship in the United States and destroy the American family. Even the National Parent-Teacher Association was smeared with the Woman Patriot’s “radical” brush, and mothers fretted about joining such an “un-American” organization as the PTA.
The women superpatriots, having learned a lesson or two from the Suffs, mastered publicity, lobbying, and public pressure tactics to thwart significant social welfare legislation and initiatives. But they also planted spies in groups they suspected of radical activity, compiled names, created blacklists, made unfounded accusations, and provided unverified information to willing government recipients, including various congressional “un-American activities” investigation committees and J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. Fomenting a culture of paranoia and fear, Kilbreth and her allies built a formidable grassroots movement, trained a cadre of skilled women activists, and developed techniques that would prove useful during the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts.
Subsequent generations of conservative women inherited this powerful political legacy and used it effectively to marshal resistance to a diverse range of government initiatives and liberal goals. A direct maternal line can be traced from the Antis we met in Tennessee, through Mary Kilbreth and her anti-Communist woman patriots, to the women opponents of the New Deal and the “Minute Women” distaff soldiers of the Cold War and McCarthy era, on to Phyllis Schlafly and her Eagle Forum housewives battling against the ERA as a threat to the American family. And today’s outspoken conservative activists—from elected officials such as former governor and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and former congresswoman Michele Bachmann, to political commentators Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, have proudly assumed this mantle.
Liberal women also continued to excel as activists, playing prominent roles in the labor and civil rights movements, peace and nuclear disarmament efforts, and civil liberties causes; but for the most part, except for the lonely stalwarts of the Woman’s Party, they abandoned the banner of women’s rights for almost another half century. Not until the reemergence of a feminist political outlook in the 1960s and 1970s, in what was called “the second wave of feminism,” did issues of women’s rights and roles again become part—a loud part—of the national conversation and enter the political agenda.
This new generation of feminists again demanded a more equitable societal role: not just in the academy and in the workplace, but in their marriages and even in their protest movements (they were still delivering coffee to their male colleagues on the antiwar and civil rights barricades). They demanded control of their sexual lives, their career paths, and their bank accounts (it wasn’t until the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act that a woman could obtain a credit card in her own name without a male cosignatory). Though it was a heady time of renewed political activism and “women’s liberation,” it all sounded depressingly familiar to Alice Paul, who lived to witness the rebirth of the feminist movement but had been fighting for most of those same things since the first decade of the century. It also would have registered as distressingly déjà vu to Elizabeth Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who’d demanded equal pay and full economic and legal parity for women at Seneca Falls.
Quite a number of these issues remain on the table today, almost fifty years since that second wave of feminism crested. But there’s been some undeniable progress, though nothing approaching parity: in the most recent Congress, women occupy 20 percent of the seats in both the House and the Senate and three of the nine Supreme Court chairs. In state legislatures, women make up about 25 percent of the delegates, and of the nation’s one hundred largest cities, almost 20 percent are run by female mayors. Women presidents lead about 25 percent of American colleges and universities, and women professors hold nearly half of tenure-track faculty positions; nearly half of all medical school students are women, and slightly more women than men are enrolled in law school. But on average, working women still earn 20 percent less than their male counterparts.
The lessons of the woman suffrage struggle deeply influenced later American social justice and advocacy movements. The lobbying, public relations, and grassroots organizing techniques developed by the suffragists, as well as their use of nonviolent protests and civil disobedience, stood as a model for midcentury African American civil rights campaigners, anti–Vietnam War protest groups, and gay rights activists. No doubt the future will bring more causes, more necessary repairs to American democracy, and more need for passionate civic activism.
The League of Women Voters, still active in every state, still educating citizens, and still “making democracy work” as it nears its one hundredth anniversary, is another tangible legacy of the suffragists. Carrie Catt continued as the LWV’s honorary president and national board member for the rest of her life. When Catt died in 1947, she was buried beside Mollie Hay, who’d died twenty years before. Their headstone reads:
Here lie two united in friendship
for thirty eight years through
constant service to a great cause
* * *
On the ninety-sixth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment’s entry into the Constitution—August 26, 2016—more than four hundred people gathered in Nashville’s Centennial Park for the dedication of the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument. A small group of Tennessee women activists, calling themselves the Perfect 36 Society, had toiled for years on this project: maneuvering around skeptical legislators and hostile bureaucrats, privately raising almost $1 million to commission a statue from a noted sculptor and have it placed in a prominent site.
The bronze monument depicts five heroines of the Nashville ratification battle, striding confidently together toward their mutual goal: four are Tennessee Suffs—Sue White, Anne Dudley, Abby Milt
on, and Frankie Pierce—and the fifth is Carrie Catt. They’re slightly larger than life, dressed in period fashion, draped in sashes, and hoisting banners as if they were setting out on a march. The tableau captures a sense of urgency and agency, of women moving forward, confident of their place.
The morning of the dedication was appropriately hot and steamy; commemorative fans, parasols, and water bottles were favorite accessories. Quite a few women in the audience were dressed in classic suffrage costume—long white dresses, yellow sashes, flower-festooned hats—and a few dapper gents sported seersucker suits and straw boaters. Everyone wore yellow rosebuds. Anne Dudley’s grandson and great-grandchildren were there, as were descendants of several other Tennessee suffragists and of Governor Roberts. Nashville mayor Megan Barry, Knoxville mayor Madeline Rogero, and Clarksville mayor Kim McMillan spoke at the ceremonies, as did Beth Harwell, Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives. Each offered her own emotional testimony of thanks to the suffrage pioneers, the women they credited with making their own careers in government possible.
When the statue was unveiled, the crowd surged forward to admire and touch it. Mothers brought their daughters to stand at the feet of the activists who’d fought in that last great battle for woman suffrage; smiling groups of Tennesseans, black and white, posed for photos beside their heroic foremothers. Alma Sanford, a Nashville lawyer and civic activist in her spry eighties, dressed in full suffrage-era raiment, rushed to the monument, reaching out to clasp Carrie Catt’s bronze hand in her own.
