Articles
American Graphic Press is pleased to include four essays on the
American equal rights movement by author Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.:
How New York Women Won Equal Suffrage 100 Years Ago
Taking a New Look: The Enduring Significance of the American
Woman Suffrage Movement
Carrie Chapman Catt and the League of Women Voters:
Winning Political Power for Women
Winning California for Woman Suffrage, 1911
_______________________________________________________________________________
American Graphic Press is pleased to include four essays on the
American equal rights movement by author Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.:
How New York Women Won Equal Suffrage 100 Years Ago
Taking a New Look: The Enduring Significance of the American
Woman Suffrage Movement
Carrie Chapman Catt and the League of Women Voters:
Winning Political Power for Women
Winning California for Woman Suffrage, 1911
_______________________________________________________________________________
How New York Women Won Equal Suffrage 100 Years Ago
by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
2017 marks the 100th anniversary of New York women winning the right to vote on November 6, 1917. The suffragists’ spectacular electoral campaign, waged during the trials of World War I, changed American history and led directly to passage of the 19th amendment and the enfranchisement of women nationwide.
One hundred years later, we can appreciate anew the determination, perseverance and skill of these New York suffragists – particularly after facing defeat just two years earlier. We also pay tribute to the far sighted, multi-cultural male voters of New York who passed the measure.
This election marked a bold chapter in American history and was a key part of the history of the Empire State. Ultimately, it was a mutual victory where activist women won equal rights for women, and regular men – male voters, not politicians – recognized the justice of their demand. The woman suffrage movement offers us one of the best examples of Americans’ love of democracy and dedication to the ideals of liberty and justice for all.
Here is a brief summary of what New York women actually did in 1916 and 1917, adapted from the text of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement” by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
___________________
Suffragists in New York State campaigned throughout 1916 and 1917 to win over the most economically powerful and politically influential state in the nation.
After their defeat in 1915, women’s groups throughout the state reorganized into the New York State Woman Suffrage Party (WSP). Determined to try again, suffragists, as required, won the approval of two successive state legislatures to submit the measure to the voters, which in itself was a remarkable accomplishment.
The war in Europe helped define the theme of the campaign. Suffragists emphasized women’s patriotic contributions and the logic of establishing at home the democracy America was fighting to defend abroad. Still, the suffrage drive took place in the midst of deep anxieties about the war, with citizens experiencing a vast national mobilization which demanded tremendous energy and personal sacrifice.
“The war had cut across the picturesque propaganda activities which had enlivened the 1915 campaign,” noted Mary Peck, and it drew countless women from suffrage work. Gertrude Brown remembered that the suffrage campaign “seemed at its lowest ebb” during the early summer of 1917 but, “as summer waned and election day came nearer, enthusiasm again began to flame up.”
Restructuring the Woman Suffrage Party
Vera Whitehouse led the state Woman Suffrage Party, with Harriet Burton Laidlaw as vice-chair and Helen Rogers Reid as treasurer. The WSP in New York City, led by Mary Garrett Hay, formed the backbone of the state effort. Under Hay, the WSP built up its own structure modeled on Tammany Hall, the powerful Democratic machine that controlled the city. Party members were organized by Assembly districts and election precincts, each of which had its own captain. In the city alone there were five borough leaders and 2,080 precinct captains.
Learning from their experiences in 1915, suffragists concentrated on strengthening support and weakening opposition in New York City. To that end, Hay appointed numerous women connected to Tammany Hall politicians to positions in the WSP. Organizers also reached out to working families and immigrant communities, heeding Rose Schneiderman’s advice that the way to the working man was through the working woman.
Winning Upstate Voters
Outside of the metropolitan area, over 80 organizers were active in upstate New York, holding thousands of meetings. NAWSA paid four field workers who, with countless volunteers from New York and other states, spoke at military camps, circularized voters, and prepared special literature for churches. These field workers crisscrossed the state constantly during 1917, speaking and seeking endorsements as well as collecting signatures. The pace was often exhausting, with long distances to cover between meetings. Suffragists were especially active in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, and other major cities where they advertised on billboards and street cars, and used large electric signs to flash their message at night.
Trade unionists and settlement house workers were zealous in promoting the suffrage amendment in New York City’s working class and immigrant neighborhoods in 1917. Even though the main suffrage organizations tended to be run by the city’s social elite, support for the measure was strong among Jewish and other northern and eastern European immigrants, and among others who had fled to the U.S.
Woman suffrage was officially supported by all of the state’s political parties but suffragists still had to deal with wartime challenges, major party rivalries, the liquor industry, the prohibition concerns of male voters, and the virulent opposition of anti-suffragists.
Women’s War Work
Like its counterparts in other states, the New York State Woman Suffrage Party established a War Service Committee in 1917 to implement NAWSA’s wartime plan. Party members sold Liberty Bonds, worked with the Red Cross and YMCA, and helped conduct a statewide military census. Suffragists also knitted garments and supplies, and planted gardens to raise food for the war effort.
“In order to do all this work and more, we have had to lay aside much of our suffrage work,” reported WSP head Vera Whitehouse in August. However, “The change in sentiment in regard to women, because of the assistance they have given the government at war, has been enormous.”
Anxious not to lose such favorable support, the WSP publicly condemned the picketing of the White House by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. Carrie Catt and others felt that the picketing alienated supporters, harassed the president, and confused the public. NAWSA and the WSP were constantly disassociating themselves from the “disloyal” NWP pickets and never objected to the government’s harsh and illegal treatment of the women during the year.
Still, similar arguments were made by both groups. Like the pickets, The Woman Citizen repeatedly argued that “suffrage for women is a part of that complete democracy so aptly named by Mr. Wilson as the object of this war.” President Wilson did voice his support during the New York contest.
Harsher Opposition during Wartime
Patriotic appeals linking equal suffrage with the war effort were not enough to silence critics. Anti-suffragists kept up their active opposition, spending tens of thousands of dollars and increasing their personal attacks after the war began. Opponents accused Carrie Catt, Anna Howard Shaw, and other suffragists of having pro-German sympathies and claimed it was disloyal and unpatriotic to work for suffrage in wartime.
Groups like the Manhood Suffrage Association Opposed to Political Suffrage for Women advertised against the initiative, characterizing woman suffrage as an “irreparable calamity.” Association president Everett P. Wheeler claimed that “Rome fell because her women entered public life.”
After a while, “absurd sallies and misstatement of facts grew tiresome,” recalled Gertrude Brown. “It was not those who labeled themselves anti-suffragists who delayed the coming of suffrage,” she emphasized. “The dangerous opponents of woman suffrage, those who manipulated legislatures and engineered fraudulent elections, did not label themselves.”
With such powerful yet largely invisible opposition, the election was very much in doubt. Even in the fall, when Mary Garrett Hay predicted victory, Catt confided to Maud Wood Park, “I think Molly’s crazy; for she really believes we’ll win, though so far as I know she is the only person who does.”
“A Million New York Women Want the Vote”
An enormously ambitious house-to-house canvass was the main feature of the 1917 campaign in New York. The tactic was diplomatically chosen, Mary Peck noted, because “it demanded service from every worker, did not offend sensitive patriots as more spectacular efforts would have done, and reached into individual homes as meetings never could.”
To answer charges by opponents that most women did not want to vote, suffragists spent more than a year going door-to-door in nearly every city and town in the state, collecting the signatures of over one million women who said that they wanted to vote.
Organizers climbed thousands of tenement stairs, walked country lanes, and visited the homes of the rich and poor. The result was the largest individually-signed petition ever assembled, eventually totaling 1,030,000 names, a majority of the women in the state. For comparison, there were 1,942,000 registered male voters. Suffragists then publicized their remarkable feat as widely as possible.
A Patriotic “Woman’s Parade”
On October 27, in a powerful show of pre-election strength, a Woman’s Parade of 20,000 filled New York’s Fifth Avenue led by officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and honored guests carrying American flags.
The parade dramatically reflected the impact of the war and the depth of women’s involvement. Divisions of wives and mothers of servicemen marched along with women doing war related work, industrial workers, professional women, and male supporters. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Catt led the parade, which included 40 marching bands and took three hours to pass.
The dignity and grandeur of the wartime demonstration made a powerful impression on bystanders. “The men on the sidewalks were visibly moved,” Mary Peck remembered. “It was not half as long as the mammoth parade of 1915; it did not have to be. Women had taken on a value which nothing but war seems to confer on human beings in the eyes of men.”
An emotional Procession of the Petitions served as the centerpiece of the Woman’s Parade. After collecting over a million signatures of women who wanted to vote, Woman Suffrage Party members mounted the petitions on huge pasteboards and carried them up Fifth Avenue, putting the plea of women for democracy directly in front of voters.
Each placard was carried by two women marching eight abreast while banners gave the totals in all the upstate districts. The petitions from New York City were transported in 62 ballot boxes, each one representing an Assembly district and resting on a decorated platform carried by four women. The petition section alone covered more than half a mile and involved over 2,500 women.
City Voters Put New York Over the Top
Huge street banners were hung in all the large cities before the November election. Suffragists held an estimated 11,000 meetings across the state and distributed some eighteen million leaflets, posters, buttons, and novelties. A burst of newspaper advertising climaxed the final weeks with suffrage arguments appearing almost daily in over 700 morning and evening papers, including many in foreign languages.
On November 6, 1917, with over 6,300 women serving as poll watchers, New York voters passed woman suffrage by a 102,353 majority, 703,129 to 600,776. Outside of New York City, the measure lost by 1,510 votes but city voters more than made up the difference. Suffragists were overjoyed and felt confident that winning New York would open the way to certain victory in the U.S. Congress.
Suffragists’ “Big Victory” in New York shared front page headlines on November 7 with other election and war news. One factor contributing to the victory was the decision shortly before the election to keep “hands off” the measure by Tammany Hall politicians, many of whose wives and daughters had become active in the Woman Suffrage Party.
In addition, New York suffrage leaders spent more campaign funds in 1917 than ever before. While in 1915 they had less than $90,000 for the entire state, two years later they raised almost $700,000. “This, at a time when the country was at war, was an achievement which can scarcely be measured. To it suffragists everywhere contributed,” noted Gertrude Brown.
During the campaign, Woman Suffrage Party head Vera Whitehouse and treasurer Helen Rogers Reid decided to raise money the way political parties did – from wealthy men. They succeeded in convincing ten men, including Men’s League stalwarts James Lees Laidlaw and Samuel Untermeyer, to give $10,000 each, and won pledges for lesser sums from many others. In addition, the first payment from the endowment left by publisher Miriam Leslie came in February 1917, adding $50,000 to the campaign fund.
The Political Landscape Transformed
Suffragists across the country were ecstatic that metropolitan, influential New York, with its 43 electoral votes and 43 representatives in Congress, had actually been won. National enfranchisement was finally in sight because of the tremendous energy and resources devoted to the New York campaign.
The number of full suffrage states had not actually changed since 1914, but with presidential suffrage the total electoral votes women had a say in had increased from 91 to 172. New York added another 43. Seven states had passed presidential suffrage during the year, adding to the new sense of momentum.
The night after the election, a Victory meeting in the Cooper Union was “jammed to suffocation with an ecstatic multitude,” according to Mary Peck. When Carrie Catt opened with the words “Fellow Citizens,” the crowd went wild and it was some time before she could continue. Then she urged the state organization to turn without pause to supporting the Federal amendment.
Following the meeting, a New York Times editorial blasted women for “bulldozing Congress to pass the Federal Amendment at once.” An unrelenting opponent, the Times criticized suffragists for going to Washington to lobby for their rights because it “interfered with the vital work of the nation.” Failing to distinguish the moderate Woman Suffrage Party from the National Woman’s Party, the paper further claimed that “it is but a more dangerous form of picketing which these sorely misguided women are about to undertake. . . . Power brings to them no sense of responsibility. They win this state only to browbeat Congress and to seek to impose suffrage on unwilling states.”
Regardless, suffrage lobbyist Maud Wood Park immediately noted a different feeling in Washington D.C. “The carrying of New York was accepted by the politically wise as the handwriting on the wall,” she observed. Politicians as well as suffragists realized that a major turning point had been reached. The enfranchisement of women had become a national issue which even the war could not entirely overshadow.
In two short years, suffragists had helped secure dramatic changes in the political landscape. With new power and renewed hope, NAWSA focused its attention on Congress to finally take up the Federal amendment. u
Suffragists used similar strategies at the national level, leveraging their state victories into ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution on August 26, 1920.
© Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
Adapted from Chapter 15 of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement,” by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr. (American Graphic Press). “Winning the Vote” includes over 960 illustrations and was named one of the “Five Best Books” on the subject by The Wall Street Journal. Order from www.nwhp.org.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
2017 marks the 100th anniversary of New York women winning the right to vote on November 6, 1917. The suffragists’ spectacular electoral campaign, waged during the trials of World War I, changed American history and led directly to passage of the 19th amendment and the enfranchisement of women nationwide.
One hundred years later, we can appreciate anew the determination, perseverance and skill of these New York suffragists – particularly after facing defeat just two years earlier. We also pay tribute to the far sighted, multi-cultural male voters of New York who passed the measure.
This election marked a bold chapter in American history and was a key part of the history of the Empire State. Ultimately, it was a mutual victory where activist women won equal rights for women, and regular men – male voters, not politicians – recognized the justice of their demand. The woman suffrage movement offers us one of the best examples of Americans’ love of democracy and dedication to the ideals of liberty and justice for all.
Here is a brief summary of what New York women actually did in 1916 and 1917, adapted from the text of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement” by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
___________________
Suffragists in New York State campaigned throughout 1916 and 1917 to win over the most economically powerful and politically influential state in the nation.
After their defeat in 1915, women’s groups throughout the state reorganized into the New York State Woman Suffrage Party (WSP). Determined to try again, suffragists, as required, won the approval of two successive state legislatures to submit the measure to the voters, which in itself was a remarkable accomplishment.
The war in Europe helped define the theme of the campaign. Suffragists emphasized women’s patriotic contributions and the logic of establishing at home the democracy America was fighting to defend abroad. Still, the suffrage drive took place in the midst of deep anxieties about the war, with citizens experiencing a vast national mobilization which demanded tremendous energy and personal sacrifice.
“The war had cut across the picturesque propaganda activities which had enlivened the 1915 campaign,” noted Mary Peck, and it drew countless women from suffrage work. Gertrude Brown remembered that the suffrage campaign “seemed at its lowest ebb” during the early summer of 1917 but, “as summer waned and election day came nearer, enthusiasm again began to flame up.”
Restructuring the Woman Suffrage Party
Vera Whitehouse led the state Woman Suffrage Party, with Harriet Burton Laidlaw as vice-chair and Helen Rogers Reid as treasurer. The WSP in New York City, led by Mary Garrett Hay, formed the backbone of the state effort. Under Hay, the WSP built up its own structure modeled on Tammany Hall, the powerful Democratic machine that controlled the city. Party members were organized by Assembly districts and election precincts, each of which had its own captain. In the city alone there were five borough leaders and 2,080 precinct captains.
Learning from their experiences in 1915, suffragists concentrated on strengthening support and weakening opposition in New York City. To that end, Hay appointed numerous women connected to Tammany Hall politicians to positions in the WSP. Organizers also reached out to working families and immigrant communities, heeding Rose Schneiderman’s advice that the way to the working man was through the working woman.
Winning Upstate Voters
Outside of the metropolitan area, over 80 organizers were active in upstate New York, holding thousands of meetings. NAWSA paid four field workers who, with countless volunteers from New York and other states, spoke at military camps, circularized voters, and prepared special literature for churches. These field workers crisscrossed the state constantly during 1917, speaking and seeking endorsements as well as collecting signatures. The pace was often exhausting, with long distances to cover between meetings. Suffragists were especially active in Rochester, Syracuse, Buffalo, and other major cities where they advertised on billboards and street cars, and used large electric signs to flash their message at night.
Trade unionists and settlement house workers were zealous in promoting the suffrage amendment in New York City’s working class and immigrant neighborhoods in 1917. Even though the main suffrage organizations tended to be run by the city’s social elite, support for the measure was strong among Jewish and other northern and eastern European immigrants, and among others who had fled to the U.S.
Woman suffrage was officially supported by all of the state’s political parties but suffragists still had to deal with wartime challenges, major party rivalries, the liquor industry, the prohibition concerns of male voters, and the virulent opposition of anti-suffragists.
Women’s War Work
Like its counterparts in other states, the New York State Woman Suffrage Party established a War Service Committee in 1917 to implement NAWSA’s wartime plan. Party members sold Liberty Bonds, worked with the Red Cross and YMCA, and helped conduct a statewide military census. Suffragists also knitted garments and supplies, and planted gardens to raise food for the war effort.
“In order to do all this work and more, we have had to lay aside much of our suffrage work,” reported WSP head Vera Whitehouse in August. However, “The change in sentiment in regard to women, because of the assistance they have given the government at war, has been enormous.”
Anxious not to lose such favorable support, the WSP publicly condemned the picketing of the White House by Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party. Carrie Catt and others felt that the picketing alienated supporters, harassed the president, and confused the public. NAWSA and the WSP were constantly disassociating themselves from the “disloyal” NWP pickets and never objected to the government’s harsh and illegal treatment of the women during the year.
Still, similar arguments were made by both groups. Like the pickets, The Woman Citizen repeatedly argued that “suffrage for women is a part of that complete democracy so aptly named by Mr. Wilson as the object of this war.” President Wilson did voice his support during the New York contest.
Harsher Opposition during Wartime
Patriotic appeals linking equal suffrage with the war effort were not enough to silence critics. Anti-suffragists kept up their active opposition, spending tens of thousands of dollars and increasing their personal attacks after the war began. Opponents accused Carrie Catt, Anna Howard Shaw, and other suffragists of having pro-German sympathies and claimed it was disloyal and unpatriotic to work for suffrage in wartime.
Groups like the Manhood Suffrage Association Opposed to Political Suffrage for Women advertised against the initiative, characterizing woman suffrage as an “irreparable calamity.” Association president Everett P. Wheeler claimed that “Rome fell because her women entered public life.”
After a while, “absurd sallies and misstatement of facts grew tiresome,” recalled Gertrude Brown. “It was not those who labeled themselves anti-suffragists who delayed the coming of suffrage,” she emphasized. “The dangerous opponents of woman suffrage, those who manipulated legislatures and engineered fraudulent elections, did not label themselves.”
With such powerful yet largely invisible opposition, the election was very much in doubt. Even in the fall, when Mary Garrett Hay predicted victory, Catt confided to Maud Wood Park, “I think Molly’s crazy; for she really believes we’ll win, though so far as I know she is the only person who does.”
“A Million New York Women Want the Vote”
An enormously ambitious house-to-house canvass was the main feature of the 1917 campaign in New York. The tactic was diplomatically chosen, Mary Peck noted, because “it demanded service from every worker, did not offend sensitive patriots as more spectacular efforts would have done, and reached into individual homes as meetings never could.”
To answer charges by opponents that most women did not want to vote, suffragists spent more than a year going door-to-door in nearly every city and town in the state, collecting the signatures of over one million women who said that they wanted to vote.
Organizers climbed thousands of tenement stairs, walked country lanes, and visited the homes of the rich and poor. The result was the largest individually-signed petition ever assembled, eventually totaling 1,030,000 names, a majority of the women in the state. For comparison, there were 1,942,000 registered male voters. Suffragists then publicized their remarkable feat as widely as possible.
A Patriotic “Woman’s Parade”
On October 27, in a powerful show of pre-election strength, a Woman’s Parade of 20,000 filled New York’s Fifth Avenue led by officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and honored guests carrying American flags.
The parade dramatically reflected the impact of the war and the depth of women’s involvement. Divisions of wives and mothers of servicemen marched along with women doing war related work, industrial workers, professional women, and male supporters. Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Catt led the parade, which included 40 marching bands and took three hours to pass.
The dignity and grandeur of the wartime demonstration made a powerful impression on bystanders. “The men on the sidewalks were visibly moved,” Mary Peck remembered. “It was not half as long as the mammoth parade of 1915; it did not have to be. Women had taken on a value which nothing but war seems to confer on human beings in the eyes of men.”
An emotional Procession of the Petitions served as the centerpiece of the Woman’s Parade. After collecting over a million signatures of women who wanted to vote, Woman Suffrage Party members mounted the petitions on huge pasteboards and carried them up Fifth Avenue, putting the plea of women for democracy directly in front of voters.
Each placard was carried by two women marching eight abreast while banners gave the totals in all the upstate districts. The petitions from New York City were transported in 62 ballot boxes, each one representing an Assembly district and resting on a decorated platform carried by four women. The petition section alone covered more than half a mile and involved over 2,500 women.
City Voters Put New York Over the Top
Huge street banners were hung in all the large cities before the November election. Suffragists held an estimated 11,000 meetings across the state and distributed some eighteen million leaflets, posters, buttons, and novelties. A burst of newspaper advertising climaxed the final weeks with suffrage arguments appearing almost daily in over 700 morning and evening papers, including many in foreign languages.
On November 6, 1917, with over 6,300 women serving as poll watchers, New York voters passed woman suffrage by a 102,353 majority, 703,129 to 600,776. Outside of New York City, the measure lost by 1,510 votes but city voters more than made up the difference. Suffragists were overjoyed and felt confident that winning New York would open the way to certain victory in the U.S. Congress.
Suffragists’ “Big Victory” in New York shared front page headlines on November 7 with other election and war news. One factor contributing to the victory was the decision shortly before the election to keep “hands off” the measure by Tammany Hall politicians, many of whose wives and daughters had become active in the Woman Suffrage Party.
In addition, New York suffrage leaders spent more campaign funds in 1917 than ever before. While in 1915 they had less than $90,000 for the entire state, two years later they raised almost $700,000. “This, at a time when the country was at war, was an achievement which can scarcely be measured. To it suffragists everywhere contributed,” noted Gertrude Brown.
During the campaign, Woman Suffrage Party head Vera Whitehouse and treasurer Helen Rogers Reid decided to raise money the way political parties did – from wealthy men. They succeeded in convincing ten men, including Men’s League stalwarts James Lees Laidlaw and Samuel Untermeyer, to give $10,000 each, and won pledges for lesser sums from many others. In addition, the first payment from the endowment left by publisher Miriam Leslie came in February 1917, adding $50,000 to the campaign fund.
The Political Landscape Transformed
Suffragists across the country were ecstatic that metropolitan, influential New York, with its 43 electoral votes and 43 representatives in Congress, had actually been won. National enfranchisement was finally in sight because of the tremendous energy and resources devoted to the New York campaign.
The number of full suffrage states had not actually changed since 1914, but with presidential suffrage the total electoral votes women had a say in had increased from 91 to 172. New York added another 43. Seven states had passed presidential suffrage during the year, adding to the new sense of momentum.
The night after the election, a Victory meeting in the Cooper Union was “jammed to suffocation with an ecstatic multitude,” according to Mary Peck. When Carrie Catt opened with the words “Fellow Citizens,” the crowd went wild and it was some time before she could continue. Then she urged the state organization to turn without pause to supporting the Federal amendment.
Following the meeting, a New York Times editorial blasted women for “bulldozing Congress to pass the Federal Amendment at once.” An unrelenting opponent, the Times criticized suffragists for going to Washington to lobby for their rights because it “interfered with the vital work of the nation.” Failing to distinguish the moderate Woman Suffrage Party from the National Woman’s Party, the paper further claimed that “it is but a more dangerous form of picketing which these sorely misguided women are about to undertake. . . . Power brings to them no sense of responsibility. They win this state only to browbeat Congress and to seek to impose suffrage on unwilling states.”
Regardless, suffrage lobbyist Maud Wood Park immediately noted a different feeling in Washington D.C. “The carrying of New York was accepted by the politically wise as the handwriting on the wall,” she observed. Politicians as well as suffragists realized that a major turning point had been reached. The enfranchisement of women had become a national issue which even the war could not entirely overshadow.
In two short years, suffragists had helped secure dramatic changes in the political landscape. With new power and renewed hope, NAWSA focused its attention on Congress to finally take up the Federal amendment. u
Suffragists used similar strategies at the national level, leveraging their state victories into ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution on August 26, 1920.
© Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
Adapted from Chapter 15 of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement,” by Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr. (American Graphic Press). “Winning the Vote” includes over 960 illustrations and was named one of the “Five Best Books” on the subject by The Wall Street Journal. Order from www.nwhp.org.
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Alice Paul, leader of the National Woman’s Party, unfurled the completed Ratification Flag in Washington D.C. in late August 1920 to celebrate passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing women nationally the right to vote. (Credit: Library of Congress/”Winning the Vote”)
Taking a New Look – The Enduring Significance
of the American Woman Suffrage Movement
BY ROBERT P. J. COONEY, JR.
Women vote today because of the woman suffrage movement, a courageous and persistent political campaign that lasted over 72 years, involved tens of thousands of women and men, and resulted in enfranchising one-half of the citizens of the United States. Inspired by idealism and grounded in sacrifice, the suffrage campaign is of enormous political and social significance yet it is virtually unacknowledged in the chronicles of American history.
Had the suffrage movement not been so ignored by historians, women like Lucretia Mott, Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul would be as familiar to most Americans as Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt or Martin Luther King, Jr. We would know the story of how women were denied the right to vote despite the lofty words of the Constitution, how women were betrayed after the Civil War, defeated and often cheated in election after election, and how they were forced to fight for their rights against entrenched opposition with virtually no financial, legal, or political power.
If the history of the suffrage movement were better known, we would understand that democracy for the first 150 years in America excluded half of the population. And we would realize that this situation changed only after the enormous efforts of American citizens in what remains one of the most remarkable and successful nonviolent efforts to change ingrained social attitudes and institutions in the modern era. For women won the vote. They were not given it, granted it, or anything else. They won it as truly as any political campaign is ultimately won or lost. And they won it, repeatedly, by the slimmest of margins, which only underscores the difficulty and magnitude of their victories. In the successful California referendum of 1911, the margin was one vote per precinct! In the House, suffrage passed the first time by exactly the number needed with supporters coming in from the hospital and funeral home to cast their ballots. In the Senate it passed by two votes. The ratification in Tennessee, the last state, passed the legislature in 1920 by a single vote, at the very last minute, during a recount.
WITHOUT VIOLENCE AND DEATH
Women were a poor, unarmed and disenfranchised class when they first organized to gain political power in the mid-1800s. The struggle for the ballot took over 70 years of constant, determined campaigning, yet it didn’t take a single life, and its achievement has lasted. Compare this with male-led independence movements. Without firing a shot, throwing a rock, or issuing a personal threat, women won for themselves rights that men have launched violent rebellions to achieve. This deliberate rejection of violence may be one of the reasons the movement has not received the attention lavished on other, bloody periods of American history – or on the suffrage movement in Britain. But it should not deceive us; this struggle was waged every bit as seriously as any struggle for equality, and we would do well to consider how women were able to do what men have rarely even tried, changing society in a positive and lasting way without violence and death.
The movement’s many nonviolent strategies deserve closer inspection particularly because they repeatedly offered suffragists the way out of strategic binds, dead ends, discouragements and immobility. The nonviolent approach was a logical strategy as a remarkable number of prominent suffrage leaders, from Lucretia Mott to Alice Paul, were Quakers and pacifists, exponents of nonresistance and opponents of war and violence. They were clear about their goals: not victory over men, but equality; not constant war, but reconciliation.
Like the now-celebrated civil rights movement, woman suffrage records the recent and useful experiences of ordinary citizens forced to fight for their own rights against tremendous odds and social inequities. Here are models of political leadership, of women organizers and administrators, activists and lobbyists. Here are the first women lawyers and doctors and ministers, the first women candidates, the first office-holders. Here are stories of achievement, of ingenious strategies and outrageous tactics used to outwit the opponents and make the most of limited resources. Here are new definitions and images of women in our national life which give a more accurate picture of the past and which help explain the way American women are treated today.
The suffrage movement included many Americans whose talents and abilities would have made them prime candidates for national office had the political system, and their opportunities, been equal. Women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Frances Willard, Jane Addams, Louise Bowen, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Carrie Chapman Catt, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Paul and others proved themselves, even without the franchise, to be politically important, enormously competent, highly influential and widely respected leaders with few equals among their male contemporaries.
The suffrage movement offers a unique window onto the emergence of women into American political life. This is where many of the intelligent, active, politically oriented women of the time, denied the right to participate directly in national politics, went. They put their energy into attacking social problems directly and organizing among themselves, locally and nationally, for their own rights.
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST
Yet despite all of this, the suffrage movement has been routinely and consistently ignored, and when it has not been ignored, it has been substantially misrepresented. The result is the misconception today – when there is any conception at all – of the suffrage movement as being essentially an old, passive, white, upper-class, naive, inconsequential cause, one hardly worthy of attention much less respect. It is treated as a lone curiosity with nothing to teach us, or worse, as a target for clever academics to critique. Fortunately, there are some notable exceptions, but this attitude and the lack of accurate information available lie at the heart of the problem.
A new look at the American woman suffrage movement reveals an entity far different from any popular conception. Not a dour, old-woman cause benevolently recognized by Congressional gods, but a movement of female organizers, leaders, politicians, journalists, visionaries, rabble-rousers, and warriors. It was an active, controversial, multi-faceted, challenging, passionate movement of the best and the brightest women in America, from all backgrounds, who, in modern parlance, boldly went where no women had ever gone before.
But rather than acknowledging this, and recognizing that women had to fight for their rights because for the first 150 years American “democracy” actually excluded half of the population, many academics and historians have chosen to ignore, discount, marginalize, ridicule and/or dismiss the entire 72-year, nationwide, successful suffrage movement. In many history textbooks, the entire movement is summed up in one sentence: “In 1920 Congress gave women the right to vote.”
Eleanor Flexner noted this censorship in her landmark book Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, and quoted the late historian Arthur Schlesinger chiding his colleagues back in 1928 for neglecting women. Schlesinger wrote:
“An examination of the standard histories of the United States and of the history textbooks in use in our schools raises the pertinent question whether women have ever made any contributions to American national progress that are worthy of record. If the silence of the historians is to mean anything, it would appear that one-half of our population have been negligible factors in our country’s history... any consideration of woman’s part in American history must include the protracted struggle of the sex for larger rights and opportunities, a story that is in itself one of the noblest chapters in the history of American democracy.”
After Schlesinger wrote this, the civil rights movement added another “noble chapter” to American history, and helped to create a new context and vocabulary with which to analyze earlier nonviolent movements for social change.
“OBLITERATED THE WHOLE STORY”
The suffrage movement stands as a lasting affirmation of our country’s democratic promise for it re-emphasizes the importance of the most fundamental democratic value, the right to vote. Flexner wrote of this in 1975:
“Recently there has been a tendency to low-rate the winning of woman suffrage as something less than the great achievement it seemed to those who carried on the struggle.... Yet full political citizenship was, for women as for any other group arbitrarily deprived of it, a vital step toward winning full human dignity and the recognition that women, too, are endowed with the faculty of reason, the power of judgment, the capacity for social responsibility and effective action. As a matter of fact, the opposition to woman suffrage itself bears witness, in a perverse kind of way, to its significance; nothing unimportant would have been so bitterly resisted. If one thinks of those, white and black, who laid down their lives only a few years ago in order that southern black men and women could register to vote, and then actually vote, it seems clear that their efforts and sacrifices were no idle exercise in gallantry and that, without the vote, no social or legal reform was either possible, or lasting.
“The achievement of the vote for women was extraordinarily difficult, infinitely more so than most people realize, since those who ought to have included it in the history of this country simply obliterated the whole story.”
So completely and so quickly was the story lost that it was virtually unknown to the next generation. Suffrage leader Gertrude Foster Brown tells of interviewing one of the women who persuaded the Illinois legislature to grant presidential suffrage in 1913, a key breakthrough in the struggle for national suffrage. She ends her article with this anecdote:
“As I sat with Mrs. Booth and her husband some years ago and they told me the tale of the winning of Illinois, he, strangely enough, remembering better than she the details of the long struggle, it was the listening young people who marked for us how far the world has moved since then. Their son and daughter, then grown, sat round-eyed and enthralled by the story. They had never heard it.
Did women, just because they were women, ever have to fight against such incredible odds? And was it their mother who had played the leading role on such a stage? Like most young people they had always taken her for granted — retiring, thoughtful, quiet and kind, just a mighty nice mother — and suddenly they saw her a general, a heroine in one of the great dramas of the world. For this Illinois victory was the turning point in the enfranchisement of twenty-five millions of women.”
THE LARGER STORY IS DEMOCRACY
You need not be a feminist, female, or even political to enjoy learning about the suffrage movement. For while the subject is woman suffrage, the larger story is about democracy, and how a powerless class in America won concessions and guarantees from those in power without threatening them with violence or death. We approach this topic not as women or men but as students of American history. We see the woman suffrage movement as a topic of its own, worthy of study and rich with content, apart from the whole field of women’s history, notable women, women of achievement, feminist theory or other more general topics where it has previously resided.
Men were suffragists. The suffrage movement both included men as supporters and depended on men for their votes. Even when state measures were lost, the suffrage question often received tens of thousands of male votes of approval, and ultimately, a virtually all-male Senate and House had to approve the amendment, along with 36 virtually all-male state legislatures. Courageous men risked ridicule and worse to actively support women’s rights, and they offer far better role models today than many better-known political and military figures.
The suffrage movement also offers us a new cultural heritage, covering not only historical figures and events, but also extraordinary personalities, intense relation-ships, colorful experiences and legendary exploits. Students will find a new view of American history, fuller and richer with new heroes. Next to George Washington and his cherry tree, we can set young Carrie Chapman Catt driving a wagon across the prairie by “dead reckoning” or brave Lucy Stone trusting her own safety to a member of the mob roused against her. We can honor Sojourner Truth no less than Patrick Henry, and Alice Paul no less than Woodrow Wilson.
The suffrage movement holds a particular relevance now as it has helped lead us as a country and a people to where we are today. It celebrates rights won and it honors those who helped win them. It is both an example of history suppressed and misunderstood and a lesson of history triumphant. It puts women back into our national history as participants. It reminds us of the necessity of progressive leaders, organizers, and visionaries in every local community. It is the origin of the yet-unpassed Equal Rights Amendment. It exposes the misplaced fears and prejudices of the anti-suffragists, and offers a sobering reminder that too many of these same foolish, reactionary attitudes of 100 years ago still exist today. Clearly the wider goal of women’s true equality and freedom has not yet been achieved, but the victorious woman suffrage movement offers a new generation of activists a solid base on which to build the future.
Harriot Stanton Blatch summarized the movement’s legacy best when she wrote: “Perhaps some day men will raise a tablet reading in letters of gold: ‘All honor to women, the first disfranchised class in history who unaided by any political party won enfranchisement by its own effort alone, and achieved the victory without the shedding of a drop of human blood. All honor to the women of the world!’”
Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr. is the Director of the Woman Suffrage Media Project and the author of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement."
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"It leaves its mark on one, such a struggle." - Carrie Chapman Catt
“TO GET THE WORD ‘MALE’ in effect out of the Constitution cost the women of the country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign . . .. During that time they were forced to conduct fifty-six campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get Legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.
“Millions of dollars were raised, mainly in small sums, and expended with economic care. Hundreds of women gave the accumulated possibilities of an entire lifetime, thousands gave years of their lives, hundreds of thousands gave constant interest and such aid as they could. It was a continuous, seemingly endless, chain of activity. Young suffragists who helped forge the last links of that chain were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended. . . .
“It is doubtful if any man, even among suffrage men, ever realized what the suffrage struggle came to mean to women before the end was allowed in America. How much of time and patience, how much work, energy and aspiration, how much faith, how much hope, how much despair went into it. It leaves its mark on one, such a struggle. It fills the days and it rides the nights. Working, eating, drinking, sleeping, it is there. Not all women in all the States of the Union were in the struggle. There were some women in every State who knew nothing about it. But most women in all the States were at least on the periphery of its effort and interest when they were not in the heart of it. To them all its success became a monumental thing.”
— Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics, 1923
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Woman suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton, on the left, testified before congressmen in 1878 in support of the newly introduced Constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. She later wrote that she was infuriated by the "studied inattention and contempt" of the chairman. (Credit: Library of Congress/“Winning the Vote”)
Carrie Chapman Catt and the League of Women Voters:
Winning Political Power for Women
Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
Prepared for the League of Women Voters Convention, 2010
90 years ago suffragists created the League of Women Voters just as they were winning passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. That effort was led by Carrie Chapman Catt, and her idea was to keep the momentum and maintain state organizations that suffragists had built. The League of Women Voters was the direct and lasting result – really the culmination – of women’s successful drive for political power in the United States.
Winning the right to vote for women was actually a daunting task, and it gave rise to the first great nonviolent civil rights movement of the 20th century – the woman suffrage movement. To get the vote nationally, suffragists had to win statewide elections where only men could vote. And there was strong opposition. Suffragists waged 54 of these state campaigns, mostly in the early 20th century. They lost most of them, but over time each state victory brought them closer to their ultimate goal of a new Constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women in every state. They realized that an amendment had no hope of passing if it didn’t have tangible support in the states.
When suffrage pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton called on Congress in the 1870s to approve a woman suffrage amendment, they were invariably told to “go win more states.” So that’s where suffragists put most of their energy – for the next 45 years – during which calls for a new amendment fell on deaf ears.
During these state drives for equal suffrage, local women gained valuable experience. Many rose to leadership positions and helped shape the national movement. These women created a number of leagues and organizations to advance their cause, and they regularly cooperated with men. Suffrage leaders generally took a nonpartisan stance and they made several attempts to organize new women voters. Some of these women later became leaders in the League of Women Voters, so their collective history strongly influenced the League’s direction. The foremost example is Carrie Chapman Catt.
Carrie Lane, as she was born, was a teacher and school superintendent in Iowa. She joined her state suffrage association around 1887 when she was 28 and later wrote: “I have given my life to the suffrage work . . . I have opened the doors of churches and halls and lighted the kerosene lamps; attended to the babies while the meeting was in progress; made the speech; taken the collection; pronounced the benediction; organized the Club or Committee; and have held all the offices imaginable from club president up and down and sidewise.”
During the 1890s Catt campaigned in the western states, often in the company of Susan B. Anthony. Catt had her first taste of success as an organizer in Colorado in 1893, when male voters approved equal suffrage at the polls for the very first time. In 1900 she was elected to succeed Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Catt led the National association for four years, putting it on a firmer foundation with better organization and more state participation. She was succeeded by Anna Howard Shaw.
In the following years, Carrie Catt traveled around the world, meeting with women on three continents. In 1912 she was a guest at the Chinese Women’s Rights Convention. She later noted, “You cannot imagine how hard is the struggle for liberty which they have to make.” International travel seasoned the Midwesterner and added a larger context to her work. When she returned home to lead the effort in New York, she continued to be active as president of the International Woman Suffrage Association, which she founded.
At about the same time Carrie Catt was coming to national prominence, Maud Wood Park was organizing college women. Park went to a suffrage meeting in 1900 and realized that she was the youngest person there. So she and another Radcliffe senior organized the first College Equal Suffrage League in Boston. Over the following decade she traveled widely to organize branches of the new League. Park told students and recent graduates that they were indebted to early women’s rights advocates because their work enabled women to go to college. Park also traveled, as Catt did, to study women’s conditions in other countries before returning to help lead the drive for suffrage in Massachusetts.
Like the College Equal Suffrage League, male supporters formed Men’s Leagues for Woman Suffrage throughout the country. These Leagues enabled voters to show their support, particularly during state campaigns. There were always male allies, and many men were suffragists. In fact, a majority of American men actually voted to enfranchise women in over a dozen states – a noble record that is unmatched anywhere else in the world, where the matter was generally settled by legislatures.
State campaigns were often rousing and hard-fought contests that demanded the most from thousands of volunteers. Suffragists created colorful posters, spoke in the streets, and talked to workers outside factory gates. They organized great parades and mass rallies during these statewide drives. They distributed millions of leaflets and campaign buttons, and carried out extensive door-to-door petition drives. They did everything they could to publicize their cause and win elections.
The National Association sent organizers, literature and moral support. But the lack of strong national leadership, with financial resources and clear direction, resulted in more independent grassroots activity at the state level. One example was the first organization of women voters, the forerunner of the League of Women Voters. The National Council of Women Voters was founded by Western suffrage leader Emma Smith DeVoe in 1911 after Washington became the fifth equal suffrage state. This non-partisan, non-sectarian Council of Women Voters worked to educate new voters, extend equal suffrage in other states, and secure public interest legislation. It grew to include all the equal suffrage states until it was eventually merged with the new League of Women Voters.
The growing number of electoral votes cast by equal suffrage states in the west strengthened the cause in the halls of Congress. With women actually voting in a number of states, there was fertile ground in Washington for a renewed drive for the Constitutional amendment. But it wasn’t the main priority for the struggling National Association
It was at this point that Alice Paul volunteered to lead the National Association’s Congressional Committee to refocus attention on the Constitutional amendment. Alice Paul was 28 in 1913, and had worked closely with militant suffragettes in England. The tactics she chose were nonviolent but more aggressive than American suffragists were used to. But she was able to put the demand for the amendment firmly before politicians, the public – and other suffragists.
In December 1915 Carrie Chapman Catt, who was 56, was again elected to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her talent and experience were sorely needed. State campaigns had stalled and the federal government still dodged responsibility. Suffragists were divided, war was imminent, and the opposition seemed overwhelming. This is where her leadership made a critical difference. After meeting with suffrage leaders across the country, Catt formulated a plan to finally push the federal amendment through Congress. If her plan was rejected, she was prepared to resign.
Catt not only called for harder work in each state for full or partial suffrage, she also finally put the full weight of the National Association behind the drive for the federal amendment. Catt’s proposal became known as “The Winning Plan” and its genius was how it offered suffragists in each state a set of customized goals that coordinated with work throughout the country. Catt insisted on the agreement of 36 state suffrage leaders who pledged to keep the plan secret to catch opponents off guard.
This is how Maud Wood Park later remembered the meeting: “When the full number of signatures had been affixed to the compact and we filed out of the room, I felt like Moses on the mountain top after the Promised Land had been shown to him and he knew the long years of wandering in the wilderness were soon to end. For the first time I saw our goal as possible of attainment in the near future. But we had to have swift and concerted action from every part of the country. Could we get it?”
To lead the critical lobbying effort in Washington D.C., Catt turned to this able 44-year-old leader from Massachusetts. But Park was worried that she was “too much a reformer and too little an opportunist” to be a good lobbyist. Nonetheless, for two years she led a quietly effective lobbying effort out of a drafty old Capitol mansion they called Suffrage House. Catt invited Montana suffrage leader Jeannette Rankin, the nation’s first Congresswoman, to speak to supporters from Suffrage House in April 1917. Women came from around the country to lobby their state representatives under Maud Wood Park’s watchful eye.
This final version of suffragists’ Congressional Committee became known as The Front Door Lobby, named for its straightforward approach. These women worked through freezing weather, wartime shortages, and the deadly flu epidemic to keep their bill moving through Congress despite the overwhelming physical and emotional demands of World War I.
While they lobbied Congressmen and the President, members of Alice Paul’s Woman’s Party also lobbied and tried to organize women voters in the west into a new political party aimed at passing the Federal amendment. In 1917 they also began picketing the White House demanding action. When they were illegally arrested, dozens of women, including Alice Paul, began widely publicized hunger strikes in prison.
Following Catt’s secret plan, mainstream suffragists continued to win more states, particularly New York, which increased support in Congress. They also won partial suffrage in 15 states, which included the right to vote for presidential electors. These victories substantially increased women’s political power as the 1920 presidential election approached. Politicians realized that women in 30 states would be able to vote for the next President of the United States.
Congress finally approved the 19th Amendment in 1919 and sent it to the states for ratification. Here the combined strength of suffragists, and their organization in the states, made all the difference. By July 1920, the 19th Amendment had won approval by 35 state legislatures, most at Special Sessions. Carrie Catt led the difficult drive to win the final state, Tennessee, going there for a week and staying for two tension-filled months. But with that last narrow victory, the 19th Amendment was ratified and signed into law on August 26, 1920.
Following their victory in Tennessee, suffrage leaders stopped in Washington on their way home to see the signed 19th Amendment. Maud Wood Park later wrote: “Mrs. Catt’s journey to New York the next day was as truly a triumphal procession as anything I ever expect to see. At every station at which the train stopped, deputations of women, many of them smiling through tears, were awaiting with their arms full of flowers for her.
“There is a beautiful picture of her taken just before the procession started when she stood in the car, the flowers in her arms and her face alight with the joy of triumphant home-coming. No one of us who saw her then will ever cease to be thankful for that perfect moment when she must have felt to the full the happiness of a great task completed.”
After the historic victory, Carrie Chapman Catt turned her attention towards abolishing war, and Maud Wood Park returned to the Capitol as the first head of the new League of Women Voters. Catt had proposed the League at the 1919 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, hoping to channel the energy of suffragists in the states after the final victory. Maud Wood Park, symbol and head of the new women voters, led the League for the first four years. She met with President Warren Harding in 1921
With former suffragists filling its ranks, the League immediately began to educate the new women voters. In keeping with its heritage, the League was largely non-partisan, welcomed civic-minded men, and actively represented the public interest. The activist nature of the suffrage movement continued to influence the League’s work for years, encouraging public displays and popular presentations as well as careful research and analytical work.
Belle Sherwin, a former suffrage leader from Ohio, was the League’s second president. She served for ten years and helped establish the League’s reputation as a serious, accountable, and objective organization. Sherwin described the League as a “university without walls . . . whose members enter to learn and remain to shape the curriculum.”
Former Minnesota suffrage leader Marguerite Wells was the League’s third president, serving the next ten years, until 1944. As president, she donated a portrait of Carrie Catt to the Smithsonian. Wells’ vision of the League called for “a nucleus of people in each community who would carry a continuing responsibility for government.” She envisioned that these individuals – today’s League members, actually – would offer informed leadership on issues as they arose.
There is a great story of Marguerite Wells that speaks to the personal passion behind all this. Like all these other notable women, she wasn’t always a “little old lady.” As a young girl on the unsettled prairie, she took a precocious interest in government. She once persuaded her father, who was a member of the territorial legislature, to let her accompany him to the all-male party caucus. Wells dressed as a boy, and went disguised in a slicker with a cap pulled down over her short bobbed hair. And she was exhilarated by the talk she heard. These were men planning their common future and building their own government. You can imagine her genuine, youthful excitement at being where she felt she belonged. She returned home and wrote an account of it in rhyme, and later became a leader of women in Minnesota, and the nation.
Wells’ vision of people taking responsibility for government is exactly what our suffrage foremothers did and encouraged others to do. In fact, for many years, the League was the main way women could be active politically beyond voting. It took decades before the major political parties opened up to women and seriously supported women candidates. And when they did, many of those women had come up through the League.
Less than 100 years ago, suffragists passed the torch to a new generation of women who became a vital force in American politics. Today, their dream is still alive and continues to inspire and inform us. And in this time of multiple crises, their vision offers a precious source of strength and hope. From its beginning, the League of Women Voters not only channeled the heritage of the suffrage movement into the mainstream, it also trained women to become informed civic leaders at the local and national levels.
Following in the footsteps of suffragists, League members have also helped write women back into history. They held elected representatives accountable for true democracy, and laid the foundation for equal political participation. Because the League successfully encouraged people to take responsibility for self-government, it has, literally, been “making democracy work.”
Winning Political Power for Women
Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr.
Prepared for the League of Women Voters Convention, 2010
90 years ago suffragists created the League of Women Voters just as they were winning passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. That effort was led by Carrie Chapman Catt, and her idea was to keep the momentum and maintain state organizations that suffragists had built. The League of Women Voters was the direct and lasting result – really the culmination – of women’s successful drive for political power in the United States.
Winning the right to vote for women was actually a daunting task, and it gave rise to the first great nonviolent civil rights movement of the 20th century – the woman suffrage movement. To get the vote nationally, suffragists had to win statewide elections where only men could vote. And there was strong opposition. Suffragists waged 54 of these state campaigns, mostly in the early 20th century. They lost most of them, but over time each state victory brought them closer to their ultimate goal of a new Constitutional amendment that would enfranchise women in every state. They realized that an amendment had no hope of passing if it didn’t have tangible support in the states.
When suffrage pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton called on Congress in the 1870s to approve a woman suffrage amendment, they were invariably told to “go win more states.” So that’s where suffragists put most of their energy – for the next 45 years – during which calls for a new amendment fell on deaf ears.
During these state drives for equal suffrage, local women gained valuable experience. Many rose to leadership positions and helped shape the national movement. These women created a number of leagues and organizations to advance their cause, and they regularly cooperated with men. Suffrage leaders generally took a nonpartisan stance and they made several attempts to organize new women voters. Some of these women later became leaders in the League of Women Voters, so their collective history strongly influenced the League’s direction. The foremost example is Carrie Chapman Catt.
Carrie Lane, as she was born, was a teacher and school superintendent in Iowa. She joined her state suffrage association around 1887 when she was 28 and later wrote: “I have given my life to the suffrage work . . . I have opened the doors of churches and halls and lighted the kerosene lamps; attended to the babies while the meeting was in progress; made the speech; taken the collection; pronounced the benediction; organized the Club or Committee; and have held all the offices imaginable from club president up and down and sidewise.”
During the 1890s Catt campaigned in the western states, often in the company of Susan B. Anthony. Catt had her first taste of success as an organizer in Colorado in 1893, when male voters approved equal suffrage at the polls for the very first time. In 1900 she was elected to succeed Susan B. Anthony as head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Catt led the National association for four years, putting it on a firmer foundation with better organization and more state participation. She was succeeded by Anna Howard Shaw.
In the following years, Carrie Catt traveled around the world, meeting with women on three continents. In 1912 she was a guest at the Chinese Women’s Rights Convention. She later noted, “You cannot imagine how hard is the struggle for liberty which they have to make.” International travel seasoned the Midwesterner and added a larger context to her work. When she returned home to lead the effort in New York, she continued to be active as president of the International Woman Suffrage Association, which she founded.
At about the same time Carrie Catt was coming to national prominence, Maud Wood Park was organizing college women. Park went to a suffrage meeting in 1900 and realized that she was the youngest person there. So she and another Radcliffe senior organized the first College Equal Suffrage League in Boston. Over the following decade she traveled widely to organize branches of the new League. Park told students and recent graduates that they were indebted to early women’s rights advocates because their work enabled women to go to college. Park also traveled, as Catt did, to study women’s conditions in other countries before returning to help lead the drive for suffrage in Massachusetts.
Like the College Equal Suffrage League, male supporters formed Men’s Leagues for Woman Suffrage throughout the country. These Leagues enabled voters to show their support, particularly during state campaigns. There were always male allies, and many men were suffragists. In fact, a majority of American men actually voted to enfranchise women in over a dozen states – a noble record that is unmatched anywhere else in the world, where the matter was generally settled by legislatures.
State campaigns were often rousing and hard-fought contests that demanded the most from thousands of volunteers. Suffragists created colorful posters, spoke in the streets, and talked to workers outside factory gates. They organized great parades and mass rallies during these statewide drives. They distributed millions of leaflets and campaign buttons, and carried out extensive door-to-door petition drives. They did everything they could to publicize their cause and win elections.
The National Association sent organizers, literature and moral support. But the lack of strong national leadership, with financial resources and clear direction, resulted in more independent grassroots activity at the state level. One example was the first organization of women voters, the forerunner of the League of Women Voters. The National Council of Women Voters was founded by Western suffrage leader Emma Smith DeVoe in 1911 after Washington became the fifth equal suffrage state. This non-partisan, non-sectarian Council of Women Voters worked to educate new voters, extend equal suffrage in other states, and secure public interest legislation. It grew to include all the equal suffrage states until it was eventually merged with the new League of Women Voters.
The growing number of electoral votes cast by equal suffrage states in the west strengthened the cause in the halls of Congress. With women actually voting in a number of states, there was fertile ground in Washington for a renewed drive for the Constitutional amendment. But it wasn’t the main priority for the struggling National Association
It was at this point that Alice Paul volunteered to lead the National Association’s Congressional Committee to refocus attention on the Constitutional amendment. Alice Paul was 28 in 1913, and had worked closely with militant suffragettes in England. The tactics she chose were nonviolent but more aggressive than American suffragists were used to. But she was able to put the demand for the amendment firmly before politicians, the public – and other suffragists.
In December 1915 Carrie Chapman Catt, who was 56, was again elected to lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Her talent and experience were sorely needed. State campaigns had stalled and the federal government still dodged responsibility. Suffragists were divided, war was imminent, and the opposition seemed overwhelming. This is where her leadership made a critical difference. After meeting with suffrage leaders across the country, Catt formulated a plan to finally push the federal amendment through Congress. If her plan was rejected, she was prepared to resign.
Catt not only called for harder work in each state for full or partial suffrage, she also finally put the full weight of the National Association behind the drive for the federal amendment. Catt’s proposal became known as “The Winning Plan” and its genius was how it offered suffragists in each state a set of customized goals that coordinated with work throughout the country. Catt insisted on the agreement of 36 state suffrage leaders who pledged to keep the plan secret to catch opponents off guard.
This is how Maud Wood Park later remembered the meeting: “When the full number of signatures had been affixed to the compact and we filed out of the room, I felt like Moses on the mountain top after the Promised Land had been shown to him and he knew the long years of wandering in the wilderness were soon to end. For the first time I saw our goal as possible of attainment in the near future. But we had to have swift and concerted action from every part of the country. Could we get it?”
To lead the critical lobbying effort in Washington D.C., Catt turned to this able 44-year-old leader from Massachusetts. But Park was worried that she was “too much a reformer and too little an opportunist” to be a good lobbyist. Nonetheless, for two years she led a quietly effective lobbying effort out of a drafty old Capitol mansion they called Suffrage House. Catt invited Montana suffrage leader Jeannette Rankin, the nation’s first Congresswoman, to speak to supporters from Suffrage House in April 1917. Women came from around the country to lobby their state representatives under Maud Wood Park’s watchful eye.
This final version of suffragists’ Congressional Committee became known as The Front Door Lobby, named for its straightforward approach. These women worked through freezing weather, wartime shortages, and the deadly flu epidemic to keep their bill moving through Congress despite the overwhelming physical and emotional demands of World War I.
While they lobbied Congressmen and the President, members of Alice Paul’s Woman’s Party also lobbied and tried to organize women voters in the west into a new political party aimed at passing the Federal amendment. In 1917 they also began picketing the White House demanding action. When they were illegally arrested, dozens of women, including Alice Paul, began widely publicized hunger strikes in prison.
Following Catt’s secret plan, mainstream suffragists continued to win more states, particularly New York, which increased support in Congress. They also won partial suffrage in 15 states, which included the right to vote for presidential electors. These victories substantially increased women’s political power as the 1920 presidential election approached. Politicians realized that women in 30 states would be able to vote for the next President of the United States.
Congress finally approved the 19th Amendment in 1919 and sent it to the states for ratification. Here the combined strength of suffragists, and their organization in the states, made all the difference. By July 1920, the 19th Amendment had won approval by 35 state legislatures, most at Special Sessions. Carrie Catt led the difficult drive to win the final state, Tennessee, going there for a week and staying for two tension-filled months. But with that last narrow victory, the 19th Amendment was ratified and signed into law on August 26, 1920.
Following their victory in Tennessee, suffrage leaders stopped in Washington on their way home to see the signed 19th Amendment. Maud Wood Park later wrote: “Mrs. Catt’s journey to New York the next day was as truly a triumphal procession as anything I ever expect to see. At every station at which the train stopped, deputations of women, many of them smiling through tears, were awaiting with their arms full of flowers for her.
“There is a beautiful picture of her taken just before the procession started when she stood in the car, the flowers in her arms and her face alight with the joy of triumphant home-coming. No one of us who saw her then will ever cease to be thankful for that perfect moment when she must have felt to the full the happiness of a great task completed.”
After the historic victory, Carrie Chapman Catt turned her attention towards abolishing war, and Maud Wood Park returned to the Capitol as the first head of the new League of Women Voters. Catt had proposed the League at the 1919 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, hoping to channel the energy of suffragists in the states after the final victory. Maud Wood Park, symbol and head of the new women voters, led the League for the first four years. She met with President Warren Harding in 1921
With former suffragists filling its ranks, the League immediately began to educate the new women voters. In keeping with its heritage, the League was largely non-partisan, welcomed civic-minded men, and actively represented the public interest. The activist nature of the suffrage movement continued to influence the League’s work for years, encouraging public displays and popular presentations as well as careful research and analytical work.
Belle Sherwin, a former suffrage leader from Ohio, was the League’s second president. She served for ten years and helped establish the League’s reputation as a serious, accountable, and objective organization. Sherwin described the League as a “university without walls . . . whose members enter to learn and remain to shape the curriculum.”
Former Minnesota suffrage leader Marguerite Wells was the League’s third president, serving the next ten years, until 1944. As president, she donated a portrait of Carrie Catt to the Smithsonian. Wells’ vision of the League called for “a nucleus of people in each community who would carry a continuing responsibility for government.” She envisioned that these individuals – today’s League members, actually – would offer informed leadership on issues as they arose.
There is a great story of Marguerite Wells that speaks to the personal passion behind all this. Like all these other notable women, she wasn’t always a “little old lady.” As a young girl on the unsettled prairie, she took a precocious interest in government. She once persuaded her father, who was a member of the territorial legislature, to let her accompany him to the all-male party caucus. Wells dressed as a boy, and went disguised in a slicker with a cap pulled down over her short bobbed hair. And she was exhilarated by the talk she heard. These were men planning their common future and building their own government. You can imagine her genuine, youthful excitement at being where she felt she belonged. She returned home and wrote an account of it in rhyme, and later became a leader of women in Minnesota, and the nation.
Wells’ vision of people taking responsibility for government is exactly what our suffrage foremothers did and encouraged others to do. In fact, for many years, the League was the main way women could be active politically beyond voting. It took decades before the major political parties opened up to women and seriously supported women candidates. And when they did, many of those women had come up through the League.
Less than 100 years ago, suffragists passed the torch to a new generation of women who became a vital force in American politics. Today, their dream is still alive and continues to inspire and inform us. And in this time of multiple crises, their vision offers a precious source of strength and hope. From its beginning, the League of Women Voters not only channeled the heritage of the suffrage movement into the mainstream, it also trained women to become informed civic leaders at the local and national levels.
Following in the footsteps of suffragists, League members have also helped write women back into history. They held elected representatives accountable for true democracy, and laid the foundation for equal political participation. Because the League successfully encouraged people to take responsibility for self-government, it has, literally, been “making democracy work.”
Women tried to vote in 1871 even though it was illegal. Here, Victoria Woodhull, with arm upraised in protest, is shown being turned back from trying to vote. She was rebuffed but Susan B. Anthony succeeded, and was then prosecuted and put on trial. (Credit: Library of Congress/”Winning the Vote”)
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Winning California for Woman Suffrage, 1911
BY ROBERT P. J. COONEY, JR.
THE DRAMATIC 1911 drive for woman suffrage in California was one of the most exciting and influential of state suffrage campaigns. It set a new standard in terms of bold actions, new ideas and successful techniques for efforts in other states. Here I would like to pay tribute to this noble victory and to share some eyewitness accounts from the campaign. But first, I want to address the broader subject. Written histories of our state and our country have largely ignored women and have obscured or co-opted the achievements of women. Thus, the need for what we call “women's history.” The woman suffrage movement is both women's history and basic American history and as such, it offers a good example of how women's accomplishments have been discounted, marginalized and nearly forgotten.
Women in the early twentieth century fought for and won their own political freedom and their basic civil rights. For society not to acknowledge that remarkable, nonviolent achievement – and the reasons why it was necessary – leaves us and our children uninformed, uninspired, and much less powerful. Defending and expanding democracy is what American history is all about. Men have fought and died for democratic freedoms and their exploits and sacrifices are honored everywhere. Women struggled for decades for the same political freedoms that men claimed in 1776 yet their efforts have been denied similar recognition.
We need to stop ignoring and undervaluing the fundamental achievements of American women as they represent the very best of America's democratic ideals. My work, in the spirit of the National Women's History Project, has been literally to write American women back into history, and to honor those women who worked so hard, for so long – despite so many difficulties – to win the rights that we generally take for granted today.
NOW, to give a brief background on women winning the vote. California became the sixth equal suffrage state in 1911, following Washington in 1910. The other equal suffrage states were Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, all in the west. Following Washington, the victory in California was seen as a major breakthrough for suffrage supporters.
We are all familiar today with getting propositions on the ballot and of having a general vote on issues ranging from veterans' housing to property taxes to gay marriage. Getting on the ballot is what suffragists tried to do in state after state for over 40 years until passage of a constitutional amendment in 1920 rendered this difficult route unnecessary.
One can only imagine the challenges these unenfranchised women faced trying to win the approval of state legislatures to get on the ballot and, when they were successful, waging arduous, costly campaigns to win their basic civil rights. Women had virtually no money, no political experience, and no power – and yet they repeatedly organized statewide drives to win the support of men, most of who had never thought or cared about women voting.
And eventually the suffragists won, ensuring the right of women to vote in a total of 15 states before 1920. They also won partial suffrage - the right to vote for president and for local officials - from the legislatures in another 15 states. These victories helped build up enough electoral power and political support in Washington D.C. to finally guarantee passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on Equality Day, August 26th, 1920.
WHAT MADE California so special? There were many similarities between this campaign and the dozens of others aimed at winning woman suffrage, but there were several things about the California drive that made it unique and particularly memorable. The timing of the California contest, and the size and influence of the state even at that time, inspired suffragists across the country and significantly increased national political attention. A victory for California's 600,000 women would double the number of women who could vote in the United States.
The innovative methods used by California suffragists, building on new ideas from London and New York, brought modern political campaign techniques to the cause including rallies and mass meetings, street speaking, automobile tours, greater use of color and imagery, and large scale press and publicity work. Suffragists consciously and cleverly used repetitive, attention-getting advertising including electric signs, giant billboards, pennants and campaign buttons, post cards and grocery bags, and hundreds of thousands of leaflets in five different languages. The vitality and excitement of the campaign brought Votes for Women more firmly into the popular culture and helped ensure victory in an extremely close contest. Organizers who were active here brought these new methods back to their own states and then to others. After the single campaign in 1911 there were 6 state drives in 1912, and 7 in 1914 – 13 contests in three years and suffragists won five of them.
Finally, the individuals who led the California campaign made it particularly memorable. These were progressive, independent minded people of all ages and backgrounds including bright, dedicated, able-bodied women, clear about their priorities, who were probably not all that different from feminists working today. Fortunately, several of these suffragists left behind first-person accounts of their experiences and I want to excerpt several passages so that we can hear their voices, get a sense of the tone of the campaign, and glimpse some of its highlights. My sources are “How We Won the Vote in California,” a post-election booklet by suffragist Selina Solomons, a 1912 report by the College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California, and the section on California in Volume 6 of “The History of Woman Suffrage.”
IN TERMS of earlier efforts, the 1911 drive actually began right after the 1896 California campaign ended, when the first amendment effort lost 137,000 to 110,000. But even then, 44% of male voters in the state supported equal suffrage, although it was defeated in San Francisco nearly 3 to 1.
During the early 1900s, members of the California Equal Suffrage Association organized local clubs and tried in vain to win support in the legislature. In 1906 the effort in San Francisco, the largest city, was severely interrupted by the devastating earthquake and fire, but suffragists were soon back at work sending press material to newspapers throughout the state and trying to win support among various influential bodies.
After another drive failed to win legislative approval, activists in 1908 tried to get a woman suffrage plank included in the Republican Party platform. To that end, they organized the first and only suffrage parade in California - and one of the earliest in the country. Suffragists gathered behind their yellow silk banner and marched from their Oakland hotel to the convention center to present their request.
Author and California suffragist Selina Solomons remembered, “We marched to the hall on the first day of the convention, three hundred strong, with Mrs. [Lillian Harris] Coffin at our head, [behind] a most beautiful banner, hand embroidered in rich-colored silks, with the shield of California, and its appropriate emblem, for us, of the woman ‘Eureka.’ Vehicles were halted, and the inhabitants gazed open-mouthed at so unusual a sight.”
IN 1910, a “progressive Republican” ticket was elected on a reform platform, and in early February 1911 the woman suffrage bill was finally passed by the legislature. It was placed on the ballot at a Special Election on October 10 where it joined 22 other proposed constitutional amendments. State politicians rarely mentioned the suffrage bill during the following months, believing it would lose. But suffragists were far more hopeful and put everything they had into the new campaign.
Louise Herrick Wall of the College Equal Suffrage League explained, “In California the general attitude of the public toward woman suffrage was not inimical, it was amused, indifferent, and incredulous. This being the case it seemed to us especially unwise for us to institute a quarrelsome campaign. It seemed best for us to put forth positive arguments of a hopeful, constructive sort rather than arguments that ended in criticism or irony.
“We saw that here our chief need was to place the subject before the people, again and again, in a way that must hold their attention and convince the voters that the women of California were seriously, if good-temperedly, determined to have a just share in the affairs of the State.”
Elizabeth Lowe Watson, president of State Association, later wrote, “We determined to make a strenuous effort to get in touch with every progressive element. Our territory was large, a portion of it immensely difficult. “We realized that the great 'interests' were arrayed against us. Untold money was at the command of our enemies and they were schooled in political methods. We had little money and less political experience but we had consecration of purpose and we gave ourselves to the work, North and South, with unbounded enthusiasm.
“There was scarcely a corner of the state that went unvisited by good speakers. Posters, pennants and banners played a conspicuous part in the campaign. The attendance at the meetings held in theaters, churches, halls and on the street corners was surprisingly large and in many instances splendidly enthusiastic.
“It was purely an educational campaign, without one shadow of partisanship or militant methods.”
“There was a very large body of neutral men voters who hardly thought of suffrage seriously,” Mary Roberts Coolidge of the College League remembered, “and had not decided how they would vote until they saw a small body of women struggling against great odds.”
Mabel Craft Deering, press chair for the College League, wrote an “Appeal of the California Woman” which put their case directly to the voters: “The women of California appeal to the fair-minded, clean-souled men of California to help the women defeat the vicious elements of the slums of the larger California cities on October tenth.
“The appeal is made especially to the men of the smaller towns and the country districts. The organized vicious interests have concentrated and are spending a quarter of a million dollars in San Francisco and Oakland in an effort to defeat the woman suffrage amendment on October tenth.
“What does this mean? It means that every brothel keeper, every keeper of a dive and low saloon, feels that it will be bad for ‘business’ if women have the ballot.
“Fair-minded men of California, in favor of the square deal, vote for Senate Amendment Number 8, fourth place on the ballot, on October tenth, and see that every man that you know votes for it too. Unless the men of the country help the womanhood of California, the splendid fight the California women have made will go down to defeat by the purchasable and slum vote of the great cities.”
THE CALIFORNIA movement included many older, experienced suffragists as well as new college graduates, working girls, professionals, business and clubwomen. Significant leaders of the 1911 campaign included:
Elizabeth Lowe Watson, a preacher blessed with a rich and powerful voice, who led the California Equal Suffrage Association;
Clara Shortridge Foltz, a pioneer attorney, who was president of the Votes for Women Club in Los Angeles;
Mary McHenry Keith, a Berkeley attorney and dedicated suffrage worker, who over time donated over $15,000 to suffrage work;
Lillian Harris Coffin, a state organizer, who founded the Club Women's Franchise League;
Gail Laughlin, a young lawyer and state organizer, who skillfully led the Election Day Committee; and
John Hyde Braly, a prosperous and public-spirited Southern California businessman, who founded the Political Equality League.
I'll mention just a bit more about John Braly because he was one of the very few men to organize and lead a woman suffrage organization in the entire country, and so was himself part of California's uniqueness. Braly, in his 70s, believed that “it was a man's job to take a hand in the enfranchisement of women, since it was the men who must decide it by their votes.” Over a period of two months in 1910, he personally recruited “about seventy good men and true” and established the Political Equality League in Los Angeles. They quickly opened membership and leadership positions to women.
Braly and other male supporters helped guide the suffrage bill through the legislature and spoke in different parts of the state for the amendment. A few of the notable men who endorsed the amendment were Henry George, Luther Burbank, Mark Twain, Congressman William Kent, Joaquin Miller, David Starr Jordan, Frank Norris, George Sterling, and Jack London. “We challenge the 'antis' to mention one distinguished name that has come out of California - one man or woman truly great - who has not been a friend of equal rights,” Selina Solomons declared.
AT THE start of the campaign suffrage leaders divided the vast state in two, with the Political Equality League and the Votes for Women Club covering Southern California and the California Equal Suffrage Association, the College Equal Suffrage League, and several other groups covering the North. One exciting innovation in the campaign was the use of automobiles to canvass counties and serve as platforms for open-air speeches. Ida Finney Mackrille, in charge of Automobile Campaigning for the College League, recalled: “When the plan of speaking from automobiles was first suggested in board meetings the conservatives cried out, 'It will never do. Such sensational methods will lose us votes.'
“But we tried automobile speaking and found it one of the best ways of reaching the voter.
“I shall never forget my first attempt at this kind of speaking. In order to reach as many people as possible, we planned a 15 minute talk just before the opening of the regular weekly band concert. I was introduced by a prominent politician.
“Tremors of nervousness swept over me and I regretted that I had ever agreed to undertake so difficult a task. Then it was time to begin - and all the nervousness left me. Voters were in that crowd, and our political freedom depended on the men of the State. We had a message to deliver, and we had faith in our men, their sense of justice and of fair play.”
Automobile campaigning filled the last six weeks before the election in San Francisco. Ernestine Black reported, “We knew that the New York suffragists were carrying off street speaking with success, and we felt that the time had come for us to reach the man on the street.
“The method of collecting the crowd was the simple one of having a boy bugler give a call or two. Occasionally we followed this with a song. We rarely stayed more than an hour at any stand always leaving the crowd instead of allowing it to leave us!
“‘I appeal to you as a mother, a grand-mother, as a garment worker, a school teacher, a trained nurse, a woman who used to vote in another state, a physician or a settlement worker,’ as the case might be. These were the appeals that kindled most interest in the crowds.
“The women who lived right here, who could lay on the argument in bright, strong washes of personal color, these were the most effective street speakers.”
A particularly recognizable and popular member of the campaign was an automobile, The Blue Liner, which saw noble service throughout the eight month drive. Louise Wall recalled, “The Blue Liner was a Susan B. Anthony among automobiles, although only a 1910 model of a seven-seated touring car, for she had, in a former incarnation, burned gas for woman suffrage in the successful campaign in Washington.
“The car was spoken of in the daily papers and considered by us as the 'campaigning-car.' She was general messenger-boy and magic-carpet for the College League.
“She met speakers from the East at the Ferry, brought materials to decorate theaters, gathered up loads of flowers and balloons for fiestas and pageants, took speakers to remote factories to speak to the men at the noon hour, got workers out for Election Day at the polls, crossed back and forth from Berkeley to San Francisco several times a week - her mistress often eight hours at a stretch at the wheel - and then off on one of the all-day, all-night campaigning trips into the country.”
One summer evening The Blue Liner carried a team of speakers to Vallejo, near Mare Island, where suffragists spoke to the crowds of young men who filled the streets on a Saturday night. “The driver set the brake and we stopped directly in front of a very brightly lighted cigar-store,” Louise Wall remembered. “The idlers on the pavement drew back a half-step from the curb, we could look into their eyes. Then, as we made no move to alight, they saw something was going to happen. The men settled more easily on their hips, others drew in behind, packing slightly, on the narrow sidewalk.
“A stranger thing never happened on the streets of Vallejo. The men pressed in closer.
“'Will they stone us?' I asked myself; 'will they hoot or will they only laugh?'
“I wish I could tell you what they did. It seems such a dream that I half doubt it. They crowded in closer, they lifted their faces up to us, listening, with the look on theirs that a child turns to its mother, of confidence and the will to believe. On the lips of a street lad the cigarette died out and hung, and on every face the smile faded.
“One should speak as a God to speak on the street, or as one knowing good and evil. It must have been so when words first came to interpret between man and man. Street-speaking is unspeakably difficult, an anguish of misunderstanding beforehand, and an anguish of understanding while it lasts and afterwards a strange, humbling revelation of the simple sincerity of men.
“When at last, each one in turn had spoken, and the Blue Liner drew out, leaving the crowd half-tottering, for it seemed to have built itself up on all sides around the car, we said to each other in hushed voices:
“'Isn't it wonderful how they took it? They seemed to understand.'“
In addition to speakers, suffragists sent women organizers out into the field, and they traveled throughout the state building up clubs and committees in every county and paying special attention to outlying districts. They realized that business and saloon interests were sure to marshal opponents in urban areas, and so tried to make up for this in the rural districts. Efforts were coordinated by a Central Committee in San Francisco made up of representatives from the six most active groups.
Ida Mackrille of the College League had advice for new suffrage workers, “In starting out as an organizer for suffrage work it is wise to take along with you large chunks of philosophy and a developed sense of humor, else the enterprise will sap energy and enthusiasm.
“The successful organizer must be a veritable dynamo, generating her own power and giving freely to all who will accept.
“The work involves a constant round of detail . . . and the idea that sustains her is the thought that has been the lode-star to us all: 'What matters physical discomfort, hard work, mental strain, - anything - if we can win on the tenth of October?'”
Several women who were experienced organizers and accomplished speakers came from other states to help, and they made an invaluable contribution. These skilled field workers included Jeannette Rankin from Montana, Margaret Haley from Chicago, Gail Laughlin from Colorado, Helen Hoy Greeley from New York, and Helen Todd and Catharine Waugh McCulloch from Illinois. Supporters in other states also sent important financial aid.
“The money from New York was a tremendous help,” Mabel Deering, chair of the Central Committee, remembered, “as it came at a time when the battle was raging most fiercely, when we needed money tremendously but had no time to stop to raise it. Besides this money, the New York suffragists from their Self-Sacrifice Week raised the money to pay the railroad expenses of three organizers and speakers to and from California.
“There are comparatively few women who can leave their homes or their professions or their businesses to tour the State.
“I shall always feel that California would not have been carried had it not been for the time and money which our Eastern brothers and sisters gave to us so generously during the last two months. We had not the workers, our funds were rapidly being exhausted; we had all of us given of time and strength and money to the limit, when this timely aid came. Let us give credit where credit is due.”
IN SAN Francisco, the College League sponsored a suffrage poster contest that led to a remarkable city-wide spectacle during the week of August 21 - 28. They offered a $50 prize for the best poster design and Bertha Boye won with her poster “representing a woman of the California-Spanish type, clad in Indian draperies, standing against the Golden Gate as a background with the setting sun forming a halo around her head.”
When the day came, the College League reported, several hundred shop windows “from one end of the city to the other blossomed in every known shade of yellow, and to point the reason for the color, copies of the prize poster, in dull olives and tan, lightened with yellow and flame, gave the campaign cry, 'Votes for Women.'
“Although permission was not universally granted, enough stores fell into line to splash the town from end to end with the significant color.
“It was said that a concerted anti-suffrage movement was made to get the merchants to retract their promises and that pressure of patrons was brought to bear from that quarter [but] many shops outran our brightest expectations.
“The letter of thanks spoke of the warm appreciation that the League members felt for the courageous, good faith of the merchants. Through them the city wore the color, that was soon to be the color of success, through one whole week of the summer.”
In the final weeks of the campaign beloved pioneer suffragist Ellen Clark Sargent died and the flags of San Francisco were placed at half-mast for her, the first time a woman had been so honored. “Our activities were doubled and trebled at this time,” Selina Solomons remembered, “until it seemed that after the intense nervous strain of months, those slender fibres that bear the life-currents were going to snap.
“There were committee meetings of the various executive bodies every morning, parlor meetings and suffrage teas in the afternoon, [then] district, street and mass meetings every evening.
“Truly did it seem a rank injustice that the same few hands and brains must do it all; must conceive the plans and execute them, administer the inadequate war fund after begging it by a process resembling that of extracting teeth, putting forth at the same time that mighty effort of brain, heart and soul that all the bank bills of the antis could not have bought.
“Here they might be found any evening during these last days, after having snatched a hasty bite at a cafeteria by way of dining - these women, who were grandmothers - one of them napping on the couch, while the rest worked on, in hushed voices, beside her.
“It is to these 'few who always do the work,' that the women of California are today indebted for their political freedom. For, while the younger generation and the new converts brought to the movement fresh vigor, hope and enthusiasm, still it was by the genius of eternal patience, the wise leadership, the political sagacity and statecraft, the self-sacrifice of many years, that the battle was won.”
SHORTLY BEFORE the election, suffragists created a powerful and well-received float for San Francisco's Labor Day parade. Holding the reins was Maud Younger, the wealthy founder of the Wage Earners League who had earned the nickname the “millionaire waitress” for her undercover reporting and union organizing work.
On the gaily-decorated float were posed two classical figures, which represented California asking Justice for the ballot, surrounded by real working women busy with the materials of their actual trades. One observer recalled, “As in the midst of the parade, the suffrage float swung down Van Ness Avenue, the thousands, roped back by the police, saw from far off the high-swinging, boldly lettered banners, wreathed in fresh oak garlands, and as they saw they clapped and cried out - or hissed - the tossing emblems.
“Down toward the ferry several sober members of the College League ran for blocks abreast of the float, to try to seize the spirit of the crowd, as our yellow challenge ran through the people's coolness like a hot iron through water, and raised a passing mist of passion from the crowd.
“The beautiful horses, the chrysanthemums and garlands about the low rail of the car, the high banners and repeated stress of phrase and color made the demonstration pleasant to the senses, but its real significance lay in the fact that working-women, in plain working-clothes, gave up their holiday to endure the severe fatigue of being jolted through the streets for hours, placarded with great signs saying, 'These are the women who need the vote.' The sincerity of the appeal, the plain, tired faces of some of the women reached men who know what it is to work for wages, and what it is to ask for a withheld right.”
Anti-suffragists, however, were always ready to be heard from. Opponents could be found everywhere in the cities where the saloon and liquor trades openly opposed the measure, warning men that it would lead to prohibition.
Interpersonal exchanges were probably common, as Selina Solomons noted. “The butcher with whom I had been dealing roared like a mad bull at sight of my badge - a yellow, not a red flag! 'If my wife wanted to vote, I'd kick her out of the house,' he declared. 'A man of your sort will never know what his wife is thinking,' I replied, as calmly as I could to this outburst. 'But I will tell you what I am thinking; that is, that you are the partner who should be kicked out.'“
THE WHIRLWIND campaign came to a dramatic finish in San Francisco in early October. Louise Wall remembered, “The Central Campaign Committee was dizzy hurling speakers into distant counties and dragging them back to let fly in another direction. Then came the homing of the more distant country organizers, to be in at the finish.
“Each day brought a worker in from the field, from far Del Norte, or wooded Humboldt, from logging-camps and mining-ledges, where we had sent our best – wan, brown, laughing women, worked down to the nerve, but the nerve gay and steady, full of stories of camp and field, of joyous prophecy, full of delight and confidence in the men of the open.
“All were in for the final great rally at Dreamland Rink. And such a rally! Thousands stood about the doors of the hall in a great overflow meeting and waited for the speakers to pass out to them from the englamoured hall.
“The day before the election, at the noon hour, we were told that Nordica, Madame [Lillian] Nordica, who was here to sing at the Ground Breaking for the Panama Celebration, would come out into the open square of the city and let her faith be known of all men.
“Thus the Blue Liner became the frame upon which triumphal garlands were hung. Great wreaths of oak leaves, touched with autumn, yellow chrysanthemums so large that a Californian seemed to have dreamed them, scores of saucy little 'Votes for Women' pennants, thrusting pointed tongues out from among the flowers, and following her long lines with a loving sense of their fine sweep, crisp garlands of fresh oak. O, wasn't she a wagon to hitch unto a star!
“As the twilight gathered the crowd began to thicken and pack itself together in a solid determination to both see and hear Madame Nordica.
“The crowds were packed for blocks in every direction and suffrage speakers were addressing them from automobiles when Madame Nordica stood up in masses of flowers in Union Square opposite the St. Francis Hotel and very simply made her plea for the enfranchisement of California women. Then her glorious voice rang out to the very edges of the throng in the stirring notes of The Star Spangled Banner.
“Standing in the automobile, and waving our banner with a grand, exultant gesture, [she] sang the song of The Banner with words of her own: 'Flash the news from West to East, that your women are free!' [tune: “O’re the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”]
“The campaign was over.”
ON ELECTION day, October 10, 1911, suffrage leaders expected the San Francisco and Oakland vote to be adverse, but held out hope that it would not be too extreme. “The day was balmy, with an atmosphere of the most perfect peace,” Selina Solomons remembered, “no outward sign of the turmoil of the spirit, the conflict of wills that we knew existed.”
There were over 1,000 volunteer workers in San Francisco on election day, over 100 of who were men. Watchers reported for duty before 6:00 a.m. and stood at the polls 12 hours before keeping tally of the count until midnight. At the end of the day, suffragists hired Pinkerton guards to watch the vaults in San Francisco and Oakland where the ballots were stored to insure against tampering.
But when the returns were posted in San Francisco that night they showed the measure being soundly defeated while boisterous members of the opposition loudly celebrated. “At Election Committee headquarters all was gloom,” Selina Solomons lamented. “Closed in the inner office were Miss Laughlin and her staff, glued to the telephone, and without, a few sat at the table, their heads clasped in their hands.”
A College League worker recalled, “All the world knows how that night our defeat in San Francisco was first interpreted as the defeat of the Eighth Amendment in California.
“To many who had never faced the thought of loss, who had believed that the powers of good were with them, the news came as a fearful, grinding shock. Strange faces at midnight, pallid, flushed and blotched faces, gazed across the election day headquarters at each other.
“'We must go right back to work,' one woman said hoarsely, staring down at the floor, as though the eight months of passionate effort lay wasted before her.
“It was agreed that we should begin again tomorrow.”
ON ELECTION night, and for two days following, the suffragists judged from the vote in the cities that they were defeated. But the favorable returns from the villages, the country districts, and the ranches came slowly in and when the count was finally completed, it was found that out of a total of 246,487 votes, the suffrage amendment had been carried by 3,587 - an average majority of one in every voting precinct in the State.
“Like the mob before the bulletin-boards,” remembered Solomons, “we had deluded ourselves with the notion that our city was the whole state of California!
“Never did the time-worn phrase, 'another county heard from,' seem fraught with such happy meaning!
“We had kept back our womanish tears on that Black Wednesday. Now we gave free rein to our emotions, in both manly and womanly fashion, with handshaking and back-slapping, as well as hugging and kissing one another.
“Our sisters, across the wide continent, had with us been plunged in despair, and raised through hope to the heights of joy when at last had thrilled over the wires that message: 'A light - a light!'”
Mary Coolidge of the College League noted, “The suffrage cause was won in California in the country districts by plain, mostly middle-aged domestic women and country school teachers, with the help of a few highly trained, eloquent, and self-devoted public speakers sent in from outside.
“Country men, in the West, respect a woman who works and stands by her husband's side in the midst of some hardship; and the women speakers who came to us and who were developed on the ground were, for the most part, women who had earned their living and knew how to appeal to men's sense of justice.”
“Unlike the great Galileo, we arose from our knees to recant our despairing denial of the great law of progress,” wrote Selina Solomons. “It was the fall, and not the spring of the year, and yet did it seem the springtime of our lives, the re-creation of all things. . . . It seems indeed as though we were experiencing resurrection and a new life.”
A WEEK and a half after the election, a delegation of triumphant California suffragists journeyed to the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Kentucky and one wrote back, “We all have Votes for Women tags on our baggage, yellow badges and pins, California poppies and six-star buttons on our dresses and coats and dainty Votes for Women butterflies on our shoulders, and as we go about in dozens or scores or hundreds the onlookers receive the fitting psychological impression and we find them thinking of us as victors and conquerors.”
And this is the image I want to end with. The more we know about the women who won the vote – and what they accomplished in California and throughout the entire nation – the better we can understand that they do indeed deserve to be remembered and honored as “victors and conquerors” and true champions of democracy in the United States.
Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr. is Director of the Woman Suffrage Media Project and author of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement” (www.AmericanGraphicPress.com). He serves on the board of the National Women’s History Project (www.nwhp.org).
SOURCES
Selina Solomons, How We Won the Vote in California, A True Story of the Campaign of 1911 (The New Woman Publishing Co.), from the Claremont College Library
The College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California, Winning Equal Suffrage in California. Reports of Committees of the College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California in the Campaign of 1911 (National College Equal Suffrage League, 1912), from the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College
Ida Husted Harper, ed. The History of Woman Suffrage, Volumes 5 and 6 (National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922)
Winning California for Woman Suffrage, 1911
BY ROBERT P. J. COONEY, JR.
THE DRAMATIC 1911 drive for woman suffrage in California was one of the most exciting and influential of state suffrage campaigns. It set a new standard in terms of bold actions, new ideas and successful techniques for efforts in other states. Here I would like to pay tribute to this noble victory and to share some eyewitness accounts from the campaign. But first, I want to address the broader subject. Written histories of our state and our country have largely ignored women and have obscured or co-opted the achievements of women. Thus, the need for what we call “women's history.” The woman suffrage movement is both women's history and basic American history and as such, it offers a good example of how women's accomplishments have been discounted, marginalized and nearly forgotten.
Women in the early twentieth century fought for and won their own political freedom and their basic civil rights. For society not to acknowledge that remarkable, nonviolent achievement – and the reasons why it was necessary – leaves us and our children uninformed, uninspired, and much less powerful. Defending and expanding democracy is what American history is all about. Men have fought and died for democratic freedoms and their exploits and sacrifices are honored everywhere. Women struggled for decades for the same political freedoms that men claimed in 1776 yet their efforts have been denied similar recognition.
We need to stop ignoring and undervaluing the fundamental achievements of American women as they represent the very best of America's democratic ideals. My work, in the spirit of the National Women's History Project, has been literally to write American women back into history, and to honor those women who worked so hard, for so long – despite so many difficulties – to win the rights that we generally take for granted today.
NOW, to give a brief background on women winning the vote. California became the sixth equal suffrage state in 1911, following Washington in 1910. The other equal suffrage states were Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho, all in the west. Following Washington, the victory in California was seen as a major breakthrough for suffrage supporters.
We are all familiar today with getting propositions on the ballot and of having a general vote on issues ranging from veterans' housing to property taxes to gay marriage. Getting on the ballot is what suffragists tried to do in state after state for over 40 years until passage of a constitutional amendment in 1920 rendered this difficult route unnecessary.
One can only imagine the challenges these unenfranchised women faced trying to win the approval of state legislatures to get on the ballot and, when they were successful, waging arduous, costly campaigns to win their basic civil rights. Women had virtually no money, no political experience, and no power – and yet they repeatedly organized statewide drives to win the support of men, most of who had never thought or cared about women voting.
And eventually the suffragists won, ensuring the right of women to vote in a total of 15 states before 1920. They also won partial suffrage - the right to vote for president and for local officials - from the legislatures in another 15 states. These victories helped build up enough electoral power and political support in Washington D.C. to finally guarantee passage of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution on Equality Day, August 26th, 1920.
WHAT MADE California so special? There were many similarities between this campaign and the dozens of others aimed at winning woman suffrage, but there were several things about the California drive that made it unique and particularly memorable. The timing of the California contest, and the size and influence of the state even at that time, inspired suffragists across the country and significantly increased national political attention. A victory for California's 600,000 women would double the number of women who could vote in the United States.
The innovative methods used by California suffragists, building on new ideas from London and New York, brought modern political campaign techniques to the cause including rallies and mass meetings, street speaking, automobile tours, greater use of color and imagery, and large scale press and publicity work. Suffragists consciously and cleverly used repetitive, attention-getting advertising including electric signs, giant billboards, pennants and campaign buttons, post cards and grocery bags, and hundreds of thousands of leaflets in five different languages. The vitality and excitement of the campaign brought Votes for Women more firmly into the popular culture and helped ensure victory in an extremely close contest. Organizers who were active here brought these new methods back to their own states and then to others. After the single campaign in 1911 there were 6 state drives in 1912, and 7 in 1914 – 13 contests in three years and suffragists won five of them.
Finally, the individuals who led the California campaign made it particularly memorable. These were progressive, independent minded people of all ages and backgrounds including bright, dedicated, able-bodied women, clear about their priorities, who were probably not all that different from feminists working today. Fortunately, several of these suffragists left behind first-person accounts of their experiences and I want to excerpt several passages so that we can hear their voices, get a sense of the tone of the campaign, and glimpse some of its highlights. My sources are “How We Won the Vote in California,” a post-election booklet by suffragist Selina Solomons, a 1912 report by the College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California, and the section on California in Volume 6 of “The History of Woman Suffrage.”
IN TERMS of earlier efforts, the 1911 drive actually began right after the 1896 California campaign ended, when the first amendment effort lost 137,000 to 110,000. But even then, 44% of male voters in the state supported equal suffrage, although it was defeated in San Francisco nearly 3 to 1.
During the early 1900s, members of the California Equal Suffrage Association organized local clubs and tried in vain to win support in the legislature. In 1906 the effort in San Francisco, the largest city, was severely interrupted by the devastating earthquake and fire, but suffragists were soon back at work sending press material to newspapers throughout the state and trying to win support among various influential bodies.
After another drive failed to win legislative approval, activists in 1908 tried to get a woman suffrage plank included in the Republican Party platform. To that end, they organized the first and only suffrage parade in California - and one of the earliest in the country. Suffragists gathered behind their yellow silk banner and marched from their Oakland hotel to the convention center to present their request.
Author and California suffragist Selina Solomons remembered, “We marched to the hall on the first day of the convention, three hundred strong, with Mrs. [Lillian Harris] Coffin at our head, [behind] a most beautiful banner, hand embroidered in rich-colored silks, with the shield of California, and its appropriate emblem, for us, of the woman ‘Eureka.’ Vehicles were halted, and the inhabitants gazed open-mouthed at so unusual a sight.”
IN 1910, a “progressive Republican” ticket was elected on a reform platform, and in early February 1911 the woman suffrage bill was finally passed by the legislature. It was placed on the ballot at a Special Election on October 10 where it joined 22 other proposed constitutional amendments. State politicians rarely mentioned the suffrage bill during the following months, believing it would lose. But suffragists were far more hopeful and put everything they had into the new campaign.
Louise Herrick Wall of the College Equal Suffrage League explained, “In California the general attitude of the public toward woman suffrage was not inimical, it was amused, indifferent, and incredulous. This being the case it seemed to us especially unwise for us to institute a quarrelsome campaign. It seemed best for us to put forth positive arguments of a hopeful, constructive sort rather than arguments that ended in criticism or irony.
“We saw that here our chief need was to place the subject before the people, again and again, in a way that must hold their attention and convince the voters that the women of California were seriously, if good-temperedly, determined to have a just share in the affairs of the State.”
Elizabeth Lowe Watson, president of State Association, later wrote, “We determined to make a strenuous effort to get in touch with every progressive element. Our territory was large, a portion of it immensely difficult. “We realized that the great 'interests' were arrayed against us. Untold money was at the command of our enemies and they were schooled in political methods. We had little money and less political experience but we had consecration of purpose and we gave ourselves to the work, North and South, with unbounded enthusiasm.
“There was scarcely a corner of the state that went unvisited by good speakers. Posters, pennants and banners played a conspicuous part in the campaign. The attendance at the meetings held in theaters, churches, halls and on the street corners was surprisingly large and in many instances splendidly enthusiastic.
“It was purely an educational campaign, without one shadow of partisanship or militant methods.”
“There was a very large body of neutral men voters who hardly thought of suffrage seriously,” Mary Roberts Coolidge of the College League remembered, “and had not decided how they would vote until they saw a small body of women struggling against great odds.”
Mabel Craft Deering, press chair for the College League, wrote an “Appeal of the California Woman” which put their case directly to the voters: “The women of California appeal to the fair-minded, clean-souled men of California to help the women defeat the vicious elements of the slums of the larger California cities on October tenth.
“The appeal is made especially to the men of the smaller towns and the country districts. The organized vicious interests have concentrated and are spending a quarter of a million dollars in San Francisco and Oakland in an effort to defeat the woman suffrage amendment on October tenth.
“What does this mean? It means that every brothel keeper, every keeper of a dive and low saloon, feels that it will be bad for ‘business’ if women have the ballot.
“Fair-minded men of California, in favor of the square deal, vote for Senate Amendment Number 8, fourth place on the ballot, on October tenth, and see that every man that you know votes for it too. Unless the men of the country help the womanhood of California, the splendid fight the California women have made will go down to defeat by the purchasable and slum vote of the great cities.”
THE CALIFORNIA movement included many older, experienced suffragists as well as new college graduates, working girls, professionals, business and clubwomen. Significant leaders of the 1911 campaign included:
Elizabeth Lowe Watson, a preacher blessed with a rich and powerful voice, who led the California Equal Suffrage Association;
Clara Shortridge Foltz, a pioneer attorney, who was president of the Votes for Women Club in Los Angeles;
Mary McHenry Keith, a Berkeley attorney and dedicated suffrage worker, who over time donated over $15,000 to suffrage work;
Lillian Harris Coffin, a state organizer, who founded the Club Women's Franchise League;
Gail Laughlin, a young lawyer and state organizer, who skillfully led the Election Day Committee; and
John Hyde Braly, a prosperous and public-spirited Southern California businessman, who founded the Political Equality League.
I'll mention just a bit more about John Braly because he was one of the very few men to organize and lead a woman suffrage organization in the entire country, and so was himself part of California's uniqueness. Braly, in his 70s, believed that “it was a man's job to take a hand in the enfranchisement of women, since it was the men who must decide it by their votes.” Over a period of two months in 1910, he personally recruited “about seventy good men and true” and established the Political Equality League in Los Angeles. They quickly opened membership and leadership positions to women.
Braly and other male supporters helped guide the suffrage bill through the legislature and spoke in different parts of the state for the amendment. A few of the notable men who endorsed the amendment were Henry George, Luther Burbank, Mark Twain, Congressman William Kent, Joaquin Miller, David Starr Jordan, Frank Norris, George Sterling, and Jack London. “We challenge the 'antis' to mention one distinguished name that has come out of California - one man or woman truly great - who has not been a friend of equal rights,” Selina Solomons declared.
AT THE start of the campaign suffrage leaders divided the vast state in two, with the Political Equality League and the Votes for Women Club covering Southern California and the California Equal Suffrage Association, the College Equal Suffrage League, and several other groups covering the North. One exciting innovation in the campaign was the use of automobiles to canvass counties and serve as platforms for open-air speeches. Ida Finney Mackrille, in charge of Automobile Campaigning for the College League, recalled: “When the plan of speaking from automobiles was first suggested in board meetings the conservatives cried out, 'It will never do. Such sensational methods will lose us votes.'
“But we tried automobile speaking and found it one of the best ways of reaching the voter.
“I shall never forget my first attempt at this kind of speaking. In order to reach as many people as possible, we planned a 15 minute talk just before the opening of the regular weekly band concert. I was introduced by a prominent politician.
“Tremors of nervousness swept over me and I regretted that I had ever agreed to undertake so difficult a task. Then it was time to begin - and all the nervousness left me. Voters were in that crowd, and our political freedom depended on the men of the State. We had a message to deliver, and we had faith in our men, their sense of justice and of fair play.”
Automobile campaigning filled the last six weeks before the election in San Francisco. Ernestine Black reported, “We knew that the New York suffragists were carrying off street speaking with success, and we felt that the time had come for us to reach the man on the street.
“The method of collecting the crowd was the simple one of having a boy bugler give a call or two. Occasionally we followed this with a song. We rarely stayed more than an hour at any stand always leaving the crowd instead of allowing it to leave us!
“‘I appeal to you as a mother, a grand-mother, as a garment worker, a school teacher, a trained nurse, a woman who used to vote in another state, a physician or a settlement worker,’ as the case might be. These were the appeals that kindled most interest in the crowds.
“The women who lived right here, who could lay on the argument in bright, strong washes of personal color, these were the most effective street speakers.”
A particularly recognizable and popular member of the campaign was an automobile, The Blue Liner, which saw noble service throughout the eight month drive. Louise Wall recalled, “The Blue Liner was a Susan B. Anthony among automobiles, although only a 1910 model of a seven-seated touring car, for she had, in a former incarnation, burned gas for woman suffrage in the successful campaign in Washington.
“The car was spoken of in the daily papers and considered by us as the 'campaigning-car.' She was general messenger-boy and magic-carpet for the College League.
“She met speakers from the East at the Ferry, brought materials to decorate theaters, gathered up loads of flowers and balloons for fiestas and pageants, took speakers to remote factories to speak to the men at the noon hour, got workers out for Election Day at the polls, crossed back and forth from Berkeley to San Francisco several times a week - her mistress often eight hours at a stretch at the wheel - and then off on one of the all-day, all-night campaigning trips into the country.”
One summer evening The Blue Liner carried a team of speakers to Vallejo, near Mare Island, where suffragists spoke to the crowds of young men who filled the streets on a Saturday night. “The driver set the brake and we stopped directly in front of a very brightly lighted cigar-store,” Louise Wall remembered. “The idlers on the pavement drew back a half-step from the curb, we could look into their eyes. Then, as we made no move to alight, they saw something was going to happen. The men settled more easily on their hips, others drew in behind, packing slightly, on the narrow sidewalk.
“A stranger thing never happened on the streets of Vallejo. The men pressed in closer.
“'Will they stone us?' I asked myself; 'will they hoot or will they only laugh?'
“I wish I could tell you what they did. It seems such a dream that I half doubt it. They crowded in closer, they lifted their faces up to us, listening, with the look on theirs that a child turns to its mother, of confidence and the will to believe. On the lips of a street lad the cigarette died out and hung, and on every face the smile faded.
“One should speak as a God to speak on the street, or as one knowing good and evil. It must have been so when words first came to interpret between man and man. Street-speaking is unspeakably difficult, an anguish of misunderstanding beforehand, and an anguish of understanding while it lasts and afterwards a strange, humbling revelation of the simple sincerity of men.
“When at last, each one in turn had spoken, and the Blue Liner drew out, leaving the crowd half-tottering, for it seemed to have built itself up on all sides around the car, we said to each other in hushed voices:
“'Isn't it wonderful how they took it? They seemed to understand.'“
In addition to speakers, suffragists sent women organizers out into the field, and they traveled throughout the state building up clubs and committees in every county and paying special attention to outlying districts. They realized that business and saloon interests were sure to marshal opponents in urban areas, and so tried to make up for this in the rural districts. Efforts were coordinated by a Central Committee in San Francisco made up of representatives from the six most active groups.
Ida Mackrille of the College League had advice for new suffrage workers, “In starting out as an organizer for suffrage work it is wise to take along with you large chunks of philosophy and a developed sense of humor, else the enterprise will sap energy and enthusiasm.
“The successful organizer must be a veritable dynamo, generating her own power and giving freely to all who will accept.
“The work involves a constant round of detail . . . and the idea that sustains her is the thought that has been the lode-star to us all: 'What matters physical discomfort, hard work, mental strain, - anything - if we can win on the tenth of October?'”
Several women who were experienced organizers and accomplished speakers came from other states to help, and they made an invaluable contribution. These skilled field workers included Jeannette Rankin from Montana, Margaret Haley from Chicago, Gail Laughlin from Colorado, Helen Hoy Greeley from New York, and Helen Todd and Catharine Waugh McCulloch from Illinois. Supporters in other states also sent important financial aid.
“The money from New York was a tremendous help,” Mabel Deering, chair of the Central Committee, remembered, “as it came at a time when the battle was raging most fiercely, when we needed money tremendously but had no time to stop to raise it. Besides this money, the New York suffragists from their Self-Sacrifice Week raised the money to pay the railroad expenses of three organizers and speakers to and from California.
“There are comparatively few women who can leave their homes or their professions or their businesses to tour the State.
“I shall always feel that California would not have been carried had it not been for the time and money which our Eastern brothers and sisters gave to us so generously during the last two months. We had not the workers, our funds were rapidly being exhausted; we had all of us given of time and strength and money to the limit, when this timely aid came. Let us give credit where credit is due.”
IN SAN Francisco, the College League sponsored a suffrage poster contest that led to a remarkable city-wide spectacle during the week of August 21 - 28. They offered a $50 prize for the best poster design and Bertha Boye won with her poster “representing a woman of the California-Spanish type, clad in Indian draperies, standing against the Golden Gate as a background with the setting sun forming a halo around her head.”
When the day came, the College League reported, several hundred shop windows “from one end of the city to the other blossomed in every known shade of yellow, and to point the reason for the color, copies of the prize poster, in dull olives and tan, lightened with yellow and flame, gave the campaign cry, 'Votes for Women.'
“Although permission was not universally granted, enough stores fell into line to splash the town from end to end with the significant color.
“It was said that a concerted anti-suffrage movement was made to get the merchants to retract their promises and that pressure of patrons was brought to bear from that quarter [but] many shops outran our brightest expectations.
“The letter of thanks spoke of the warm appreciation that the League members felt for the courageous, good faith of the merchants. Through them the city wore the color, that was soon to be the color of success, through one whole week of the summer.”
In the final weeks of the campaign beloved pioneer suffragist Ellen Clark Sargent died and the flags of San Francisco were placed at half-mast for her, the first time a woman had been so honored. “Our activities were doubled and trebled at this time,” Selina Solomons remembered, “until it seemed that after the intense nervous strain of months, those slender fibres that bear the life-currents were going to snap.
“There were committee meetings of the various executive bodies every morning, parlor meetings and suffrage teas in the afternoon, [then] district, street and mass meetings every evening.
“Truly did it seem a rank injustice that the same few hands and brains must do it all; must conceive the plans and execute them, administer the inadequate war fund after begging it by a process resembling that of extracting teeth, putting forth at the same time that mighty effort of brain, heart and soul that all the bank bills of the antis could not have bought.
“Here they might be found any evening during these last days, after having snatched a hasty bite at a cafeteria by way of dining - these women, who were grandmothers - one of them napping on the couch, while the rest worked on, in hushed voices, beside her.
“It is to these 'few who always do the work,' that the women of California are today indebted for their political freedom. For, while the younger generation and the new converts brought to the movement fresh vigor, hope and enthusiasm, still it was by the genius of eternal patience, the wise leadership, the political sagacity and statecraft, the self-sacrifice of many years, that the battle was won.”
SHORTLY BEFORE the election, suffragists created a powerful and well-received float for San Francisco's Labor Day parade. Holding the reins was Maud Younger, the wealthy founder of the Wage Earners League who had earned the nickname the “millionaire waitress” for her undercover reporting and union organizing work.
On the gaily-decorated float were posed two classical figures, which represented California asking Justice for the ballot, surrounded by real working women busy with the materials of their actual trades. One observer recalled, “As in the midst of the parade, the suffrage float swung down Van Ness Avenue, the thousands, roped back by the police, saw from far off the high-swinging, boldly lettered banners, wreathed in fresh oak garlands, and as they saw they clapped and cried out - or hissed - the tossing emblems.
“Down toward the ferry several sober members of the College League ran for blocks abreast of the float, to try to seize the spirit of the crowd, as our yellow challenge ran through the people's coolness like a hot iron through water, and raised a passing mist of passion from the crowd.
“The beautiful horses, the chrysanthemums and garlands about the low rail of the car, the high banners and repeated stress of phrase and color made the demonstration pleasant to the senses, but its real significance lay in the fact that working-women, in plain working-clothes, gave up their holiday to endure the severe fatigue of being jolted through the streets for hours, placarded with great signs saying, 'These are the women who need the vote.' The sincerity of the appeal, the plain, tired faces of some of the women reached men who know what it is to work for wages, and what it is to ask for a withheld right.”
Anti-suffragists, however, were always ready to be heard from. Opponents could be found everywhere in the cities where the saloon and liquor trades openly opposed the measure, warning men that it would lead to prohibition.
Interpersonal exchanges were probably common, as Selina Solomons noted. “The butcher with whom I had been dealing roared like a mad bull at sight of my badge - a yellow, not a red flag! 'If my wife wanted to vote, I'd kick her out of the house,' he declared. 'A man of your sort will never know what his wife is thinking,' I replied, as calmly as I could to this outburst. 'But I will tell you what I am thinking; that is, that you are the partner who should be kicked out.'“
THE WHIRLWIND campaign came to a dramatic finish in San Francisco in early October. Louise Wall remembered, “The Central Campaign Committee was dizzy hurling speakers into distant counties and dragging them back to let fly in another direction. Then came the homing of the more distant country organizers, to be in at the finish.
“Each day brought a worker in from the field, from far Del Norte, or wooded Humboldt, from logging-camps and mining-ledges, where we had sent our best – wan, brown, laughing women, worked down to the nerve, but the nerve gay and steady, full of stories of camp and field, of joyous prophecy, full of delight and confidence in the men of the open.
“All were in for the final great rally at Dreamland Rink. And such a rally! Thousands stood about the doors of the hall in a great overflow meeting and waited for the speakers to pass out to them from the englamoured hall.
“The day before the election, at the noon hour, we were told that Nordica, Madame [Lillian] Nordica, who was here to sing at the Ground Breaking for the Panama Celebration, would come out into the open square of the city and let her faith be known of all men.
“Thus the Blue Liner became the frame upon which triumphal garlands were hung. Great wreaths of oak leaves, touched with autumn, yellow chrysanthemums so large that a Californian seemed to have dreamed them, scores of saucy little 'Votes for Women' pennants, thrusting pointed tongues out from among the flowers, and following her long lines with a loving sense of their fine sweep, crisp garlands of fresh oak. O, wasn't she a wagon to hitch unto a star!
“As the twilight gathered the crowd began to thicken and pack itself together in a solid determination to both see and hear Madame Nordica.
“The crowds were packed for blocks in every direction and suffrage speakers were addressing them from automobiles when Madame Nordica stood up in masses of flowers in Union Square opposite the St. Francis Hotel and very simply made her plea for the enfranchisement of California women. Then her glorious voice rang out to the very edges of the throng in the stirring notes of The Star Spangled Banner.
“Standing in the automobile, and waving our banner with a grand, exultant gesture, [she] sang the song of The Banner with words of her own: 'Flash the news from West to East, that your women are free!' [tune: “O’re the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”]
“The campaign was over.”
ON ELECTION day, October 10, 1911, suffrage leaders expected the San Francisco and Oakland vote to be adverse, but held out hope that it would not be too extreme. “The day was balmy, with an atmosphere of the most perfect peace,” Selina Solomons remembered, “no outward sign of the turmoil of the spirit, the conflict of wills that we knew existed.”
There were over 1,000 volunteer workers in San Francisco on election day, over 100 of who were men. Watchers reported for duty before 6:00 a.m. and stood at the polls 12 hours before keeping tally of the count until midnight. At the end of the day, suffragists hired Pinkerton guards to watch the vaults in San Francisco and Oakland where the ballots were stored to insure against tampering.
But when the returns were posted in San Francisco that night they showed the measure being soundly defeated while boisterous members of the opposition loudly celebrated. “At Election Committee headquarters all was gloom,” Selina Solomons lamented. “Closed in the inner office were Miss Laughlin and her staff, glued to the telephone, and without, a few sat at the table, their heads clasped in their hands.”
A College League worker recalled, “All the world knows how that night our defeat in San Francisco was first interpreted as the defeat of the Eighth Amendment in California.
“To many who had never faced the thought of loss, who had believed that the powers of good were with them, the news came as a fearful, grinding shock. Strange faces at midnight, pallid, flushed and blotched faces, gazed across the election day headquarters at each other.
“'We must go right back to work,' one woman said hoarsely, staring down at the floor, as though the eight months of passionate effort lay wasted before her.
“It was agreed that we should begin again tomorrow.”
ON ELECTION night, and for two days following, the suffragists judged from the vote in the cities that they were defeated. But the favorable returns from the villages, the country districts, and the ranches came slowly in and when the count was finally completed, it was found that out of a total of 246,487 votes, the suffrage amendment had been carried by 3,587 - an average majority of one in every voting precinct in the State.
“Like the mob before the bulletin-boards,” remembered Solomons, “we had deluded ourselves with the notion that our city was the whole state of California!
“Never did the time-worn phrase, 'another county heard from,' seem fraught with such happy meaning!
“We had kept back our womanish tears on that Black Wednesday. Now we gave free rein to our emotions, in both manly and womanly fashion, with handshaking and back-slapping, as well as hugging and kissing one another.
“Our sisters, across the wide continent, had with us been plunged in despair, and raised through hope to the heights of joy when at last had thrilled over the wires that message: 'A light - a light!'”
Mary Coolidge of the College League noted, “The suffrage cause was won in California in the country districts by plain, mostly middle-aged domestic women and country school teachers, with the help of a few highly trained, eloquent, and self-devoted public speakers sent in from outside.
“Country men, in the West, respect a woman who works and stands by her husband's side in the midst of some hardship; and the women speakers who came to us and who were developed on the ground were, for the most part, women who had earned their living and knew how to appeal to men's sense of justice.”
“Unlike the great Galileo, we arose from our knees to recant our despairing denial of the great law of progress,” wrote Selina Solomons. “It was the fall, and not the spring of the year, and yet did it seem the springtime of our lives, the re-creation of all things. . . . It seems indeed as though we were experiencing resurrection and a new life.”
A WEEK and a half after the election, a delegation of triumphant California suffragists journeyed to the annual convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Kentucky and one wrote back, “We all have Votes for Women tags on our baggage, yellow badges and pins, California poppies and six-star buttons on our dresses and coats and dainty Votes for Women butterflies on our shoulders, and as we go about in dozens or scores or hundreds the onlookers receive the fitting psychological impression and we find them thinking of us as victors and conquerors.”
And this is the image I want to end with. The more we know about the women who won the vote – and what they accomplished in California and throughout the entire nation – the better we can understand that they do indeed deserve to be remembered and honored as “victors and conquerors” and true champions of democracy in the United States.
Robert P. J. Cooney, Jr. is Director of the Woman Suffrage Media Project and author of “Winning the Vote: The Triumph of the American Woman Suffrage Movement” (www.AmericanGraphicPress.com). He serves on the board of the National Women’s History Project (www.nwhp.org).
SOURCES
Selina Solomons, How We Won the Vote in California, A True Story of the Campaign of 1911 (The New Woman Publishing Co.), from the Claremont College Library
The College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California, Winning Equal Suffrage in California. Reports of Committees of the College Equal Suffrage League of Northern California in the Campaign of 1911 (National College Equal Suffrage League, 1912), from the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College
Ida Husted Harper, ed. The History of Woman Suffrage, Volumes 5 and 6 (National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922)