The women’s suffrage movement in the US and the UK was the first modern social movement. It was modern in the sense that it had PR awareness: They had attention-grabbing graphic art, identifiable clothing (white, green purple colors), photo-ops, and songs. They had formal organisations with paid staff members and armies of volunteers. They worked through legal means to obtain suffrage at the local level, as well as militant action to inspire national debate. Some suffragist organizations joined forces. Some suffragists split over ideological differences. The core suffragettes lived in a parallel society with its own values and norms.
The women’s suffrage movement is a kaleidoscope of all the fates and fortunes known to modern social movements. Its history was very well documented by the women themselves, through their letters, diaries, and auto-biographies.
Understanding the women’s suffrage movement is to understand activism at its best and at its worst.
Beginnings
The movement arguable began with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, organised by writer and activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Here came the first clear, collective statement of goals regarding women’s natural rights.
Three years later, Stanton would meet Quaker abolitionist and temperance activist Susan B. Anthony, and begin a life-long friendship that would form the core of the women’s suffrage movement in the US for the next two decades.
It is no coincidence that many of the early suffragists were already involved in anti-slavery and in temperance movements. There, they had gained practice in public speaking and they had gained the confidence to campaign for their own interests. Notably, former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass was present at the Seneca Falls meeting and is remembered for arguing for the inclusion of suffrage among the demands to be made in the conference’s final declaration.
Side Controversies
The link to the abolitionist scene provided the early suffragists with a network of sympathisers and publishers. Sadly, Stanton and Anthony did not fully appreciate their indebtedness to the abolitionist movement. They scandalised the suffrage movement with their association with outspoken racist George Francis Train.
The two women publicly defended an English maid named Hester Vaughn, who had been convicted of killing her newborn baby. The baby, the result of rape by a former employer, died in an unheated tenement, and her sick and enfeebled mother was unable to prevent it, and was accused of having no interest in preventing it. Stanton and Anthony also defended Abby Richardson, a woman who divorced an abusive husband. While support of Vaughn and Richardson would not today be particularly controversial, it implied at the time that Stanton and Anthony were after more than female suffrage, namely, the legitimization of every objectionable behaviour that women could invent.
Anthony encouraged women in 1869 to take advantage of employer-provided training in the printing industry. Unfortunately, the program was a response to a strike — an attempt to repopulate empty work stations. Anthony managed to infuriate her then-allies in the national labor movement.
Stanton and Anthony’s legitimate interest in the rights and plights of American women had caused controversy that was not directly related to female suffrage. While understandable from the point of view of principle, it was from a strategic perspective an albatross.
First Split
When the 15th Amendment to the US constitution was proposed in 1869 to grant voting rights regardless of race, many suffragists were disquieted that ‘sex’ was not also included in the text. Stanton and Anthony went one step further by outright opposing suffrage for African Americans. Stanton would even say, “It becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and let ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.” Many suffragists took offense at this attitude; the issue caused a split in the women’s suffrage movement.
In 1869, Stanton and Anthony’s leadership were put formally to the test at a meeting of the American Equal Rights Association. Their ideas were voted down. The two women almost immediately formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. Not long thereafter, women’s rights advocates Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association. These two organisations, for the next twenty years, would work on separate tracks. The NWSA (Stanton-Anthony) would work on a constitutional amendment. The AWSA (Stone-Howe) worked on suffrage at the state level.
This split arguably saved the movement. Instead of wasting time and energy on internal bickering, the two groups pursued goals relevant to women’s suffrage. Neither was in any way hindered by the other. Most importantly, Stanton and Anthony were free to pursue a disastrous series of decisions, which hindered only their own organization.
Disasters of the NWSA
In particular, Stanton and Anthony began to harden their racist and elitist position. Stanton would write, “American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood to make laws for you and your daughters … demand that women too shall be represented in government.”
Stanton and Anthony sought to create their own newspaper, and turned again to racist financier George Francis Train for funding. The result was the foundation of weekly The Revolution. It lasted four years, only two of which were under control of Stanton and Anthony. Stone, on the other hand, founded the Women’s Journal, which effectively became the newspaper of the entire movement, not just the AWSA.
In 1870, Stanton and Anthony began a disastrous association with spiritualist and free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull. She and her sister, Tennessee, had successfully ingratiated themselves in the company of powerful men. They thereby became the owners of a Wall Street stock brokerage, and Woodhull got the opportunity to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on women’s suffrage. She immediately became a star of the movement, and of the NWSA in particular.
Unfortunately, Woodhull’s free-love advocacy would prove to be one hundred years ahead of its time. It was unthinkable in 19th century America, and became therefore, toxic to the movement. Woodhull was attacked in the press, was arrested three times, and thereby created a link between women’s suffrage and moral delinquency. NWSA membership fell. Most of its chapters dissociated from the parent body. A topic, which was not narrowly related to suffrage, was allowed to set the movement back at least twenty years.
In the end, history decided against Stanton and Anthony. Many victories had been won at the state level thanks to the AWSA: Wyoming had given women the vote in 1869, followed by Utah in 1870. On the other hand, a proposed constitutional amendment affirming women’s suffrage was soundly defeated in the senate in 1887.
At the time of the NWSA-AWSA split in 1869, women were granted the right to vote in the Wyoming Territory. Boys born that year would grow up in a country in which some women voted. Those boys would be fifty-one years old in 1920. The scandal and the offense of female suffrage would seem old-fashioned to them. This is called the long game.
In 1890, the two organisations (NWSA and AWSA) merged. The next ten years were a quiet period for the movement. The topic did not command much public interest and it seemingly had not garnered much public support. In 1895, Massachusetts held a non-binding referendum on women’s suffrage. Only 4% of eligible women voted. Anti-suffrage organisations declared victory; women obviously did not wish to vote or they would have voted at least in that referendum.
Anthony resigned as president of the NAWSA in 1900. She was eighty years old. Stanton died two years later.
Women’s suffrage in the 19th century was, practically speaking, an impossible campaign: the first suffragists literally died waiting. Their early demands were met with incomprehension, then disdain, then ridicule. These were the achievements of the first generation of suffragists.
Militancy of the 20th Century
The second generation proved to be breath-takingly audacious compared to their Victorian predecessors. The story begins in England.
As in the US, the latter half of the nineteenth century was for British suffragists a time of speeches, declarations, and petitions. As in the US, none of it had the desired legislative effect.
In 1903, social activist Emmeline Pankurst and her daughter Cristabel formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and by 1906, the term “suffragette” was born. The suffragettes became known for their willingness to interrupt the speeches of politicians in order to press their cause. They organized marches and demonstrations. They were willing to endure arrest and imprisonment for their disruptions. While these are common tactics now, at the time, it was shocking to see women agitate publicly. It made women’s suffrage a hot topic once again.
In 1907, a split occurred. The Pankhursts had decided that the WSPU was best run as military organisation, with decisions made by the mother-daughter pair at the top, and orders carried out by those below. Discussions and quibbling would only slow the movement down. However, a sizable portion of the WSPU membership disagreed. They formed the Women’s Freedom League. This split was not productive. As the Pankhursts became increasingly militant, they captured headlines. Women’s suffrage became the contest between the pain that the government could inflict on activists, on one hand, and the embarrassment that activists could inflict on the government, on the other. The polite speeches and petitions of the more civil organisations dropped off the radar.
In 1912, the leadership of the WPSU felt the government had let them down one time too many; their repertoire of tactics grew to include the smashing of windows, setting post boxes on fire, setting houses on fire, and even the planting of bombs. No lives were lost in these attacks, but this is due to luck alone. This campaign of terror made every female subcitizen a potential threat, and women had free run of the country.
Yet another split occurred at this time: officers of the WPSU who did not embrace the aggressive new tactics were expelled. This included middle daughter Sylvia Pankurst, who had been sent to organise in London’s impoverished East End, only let herself get distracted by the social and economic plight of women there. In fact, the class consciousness of the WPSU became evident by their goal of securing the vote only for educated women like themselves, which Silvia Pankhurst opposed.
The militancy of the WPSU had one undeniable effect, which was to keep women’s suffrage int he news. Recall that in the lull of the 1890s, Massachusetts women failed to turn out in meaningful numbers to vote in a referendum on women’s suffrage. By creating news events, the WPSU signaled to the British public that the matter was not settled.
Imprisoned suffragettes increasingly used hunger strikes to protest their imprisonments. The government reacted by gavaging the prisoners. This provided the WPSU a PR coup. It could appeal to public sympathy for something which was arguably thinly-veiled torture.
World War I
The beginning of the first world war brought an end to WSPU activities, and it might have been a relief for the Pankhursts, whose strategy had alienated many collaborators. Public support for their methods had cooled. In particular, politicians were reluctant to be seen cowing before terrorism. The WPSU brought itself back into the good graces of the government by supporting the war effort. They were rewarded with a release of prisoners. British suffragettes in general supported the war effort, and at the end of the war, their leadership was rewarded with the right to vote — that is, land-owning women over the age of 30. Poor women, who did not own land and who did not live long past the age of 30 were excluded.
It is not clear how much pressure militancy put on the British government. One thing is clear: between 1912 and 1914, the WPSU stopped explaining itself and started making a problem of itself. Was this the critical shift, or did suffrage come at the end of an overly-long campaign and was due to come without militancy?
Alice Paul and the US Movement
It is now easy to imagine the social environment that greeted twenty-two year old university student Alice Paul when she arrived on the scene from America in 1907. Paul rose to prominence in the WPSU, both as an organiser and as a front-line participant. Through multiple arrests and imprisonments, she would learn state-of-the-art civil disobedience tactics at the heart of the WPSU. By 1910, she was ready to return to the US.
Paul quickly became an organiser of the unified NAWSA. She organized a women’s suffrage procession in Washington D.C., which drew national attention. Between 1917 and 1919, she and over 2000 other activists took part in silent protest outside the White House, on a rotating basis, six days per week. They were known as the Silent Sentinels. Many were arrested, and the brutal prison conditions they endured were widely publisized.
On June 4th, 1919, the nineteenth amendment to the US constitution, giving the franchise to women, was passed in Congress.
Success of the Suffrage Movement
Why did the women’s suffrage movement succeed? Given its seventy year run, it is perhaps more instructive to ask why it took so long.
The first mistake is the direct approach that was initially taken: simply explaining the reasonableness of the demand. Early suffragists wrote articles and gave speeches, as if to convince men to give up their prerogatives for the sake of intellectual rectitude. It is important to remember that in the 19th century, a woman was essentially a non-person. She was obliged to obey her father, and after marriage, her husband. A wife’s property and wages belonged to her husband. A male school teacher might expect a monthly wage of $10; his female colleague, only $2.50. Motherhood outside of marriage was a disaster on every dimension. The disadvantages that women faced translated in one way or another into advantages or at least latitude for men. The early decades of the movement failed to gain traction because it concentrated on convincing men to fix a problem which did not exist for them — quite the contrary.
The second mistake was underestimating the hypocritical and retrograde morality of the 19th century. Things that are crooked snap under pressure; these are things that are therefore defended reflexively — not because of their virtues, but because of their weakness. Early suffragists were not working in a rational environment.
The third mistake was taking up causes not directly related to suffrage; early activists alienated supporters and outraged adversaries needlessly. Obviously, women’s rights are important to female suffragists, but side projects made the suffrage campaign unmanageable from a PR perspective. Fair or not, unrelated controversies distracted both allies and adversaries. What it means to be too far ahead of one’s time is to be an enemy of the present.
History has vindicated those early suffragists; they were proven right. They nevertheless died waiting.
Related Movements: Abolition and Temperance
In the first half of the century, public speaking was an unusual activity for a woman, and scarcely tolerated. As educated women became more active in the temperance and abolitionist movements, some would become prominent representatives and therefore the most credible speakers. Women learned to speak for themselves and men learned to tolerate it. Women’s voices in public debate gave them political legitimacy.
Industrial Revolution
The biggest contributor to the change in public opinion was the independent shift of women’s roles in society. Before the industrial revolution, women were the maids and nannies of their husband’s farms. With the establishment of textile mills in New England, a sea change occurred. For the first time in Western history, young women lived beyond the control of their male relatives and earned salaries that they could spend as best pleased them. By attending lectures and making use of public libraries, common women gained an unprecedented level of education.
The self-educated mill girls quickly understood their situation; the earliest industrial strike (1824) was by female textile workers in Rhode Island.
Because male and female factory workers faced similar working conditions, there were collaborations between men’s and women’s trade unions. Capitalism, ironically, had the effect of putting men and women on level ground by means of common exploitation.
The Long Game
The first states to enfranchise women (Wyoming in 1869, Utah in 1870, Colorado in 1893, Idaho in 1896) were hardly considered progressive outposts at the time, and lack that distinction even today. What happened?
The American West presented an economic reality unlike that in the east. Pioneer women often stepped outside gender-based roles due to sheer necessity. The life story of Laura Engels Wilder (Little House on the Prairie) is a good example. These women were no one’s pets.
Territories gained in the War of Mexican Cession had known Spanish civil law, which granted women more progressive property rights than states which were founded on English law. Here, the expectation was inherited.
The gold rush if 1849 brought a disproportionate number of men to the West in a very short amount of time. The women who came early had opportunities to found businesses catering to miners, and many made their fortunes in this way. Property rights, and the rights necessary to autonomy were important to them, and therefore, to the men who wanted them to stay.
These factors lay the foundation for women’s suffrage to be enacted in the West before older parts of the country. In other words, the legal legacy of the West, combined with gender imbalance, created a unique environment favourable to women’s suffrage. Lucy Stone saw this as an opportunity for progress and the AWSA was able to make use of it. By the end of the 19th century, four states offered women full suffrage. In many other states, women were able to vote at the municipal level. This had the effect of normalising women’s suffrage. The families living in those states were not destroyed by their mothers’ right to vote. The debate shifted from why women ought to have the vote to, for example, why does Utah grant it and Ohio not?
Epilogue
Susan B. Anthony is the first American woman to have her likeness on a coin. That implies that she is a significant historical figure. Nevertheless, her career was one of nearly unrelenting failure and bad judgment. With the exception of married women’s property rights legislation passed in 1860 and which was rolled back two years later, Anthony had no successes to speak of. Her life’s work was unachieved when she died in 1906. The movement itself was stagnating. And yet, she is ostensibly America’s foremost suffragist.
Lesson: persistence matters