The Long History of the Battle for Women’s

The Age-Old Absence of Rights for Women

The compelling need by women throughout the world to secure rights – over their lives, their children, their bodies, their property - has burned for centuries.

In America it was not only regarding voting that women were disadvantaged. The absence of women’s rights – long before women’s suffrage – was cruelly obvious. A woman’s property became her husband’s upon marriage, and women were only gradually allowed to act as independent agents in legal contexts on a state-by-state basis after 1839. American women, until well into the 20th century, could not sue for divorce or gain legal custody of their children if their husbands divorced them or died. Age, sex and wage discrimination in the workplace was legal, and widely practiced. Few laws gave women any right to their earnings or inheritance and even fewer laws addressed physical abuses that women suffered at the hands of their husbands. The U.S. followed English Common Law: “The husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband.”

Where is the “Right” in “Right to Vote”?

Isn’t the “right to vote” one of our most fundamental constitutional rights? In fact, it is not. Neither the original Constitution nor the Bill of Rights expressly guarantees the right to vote. Until the 15th Amendment passed in 1870, granting the vote to all African American men, each state decided who could vote. Only in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court concluded that the 14th Amendment implicitly protected the right to vote, did voting come to be regarded as a fundamental federal constitutional right.

And women? They were expressly prohibited from voting in all the original state constitutions except New Jersey’s after the Revolutionary War, and New Jersey’s tolerance for women’s suffrage ended in 1807.

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The Anti-Slavery Movement: The Cradle of Women’s Suffrage

The desire for female self-determination was already evident in the late 1700s as American women became increasingly involved in the anti-slavery movement. The cause of abolition led many of them into the public sphere for the first time. But as they defended the rights of African American people to be free, they began to look at their own constrained situation as women.

In New Jersey in the early 1790s, Quakers formed the New Jersey Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, a chapter of the most prominent abolitionist group in the young nation. Women were active members of this and other anti-slavery organizations.

Sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, staunch and outspoken abolitionists, discussed women’s place in the public discourse as early as the 1830s. (They later ran an Underground Railroad stop in Perth Amboy in the early 1860s.)

In many places, women were prohibited from being members of and speaking at Anti-Slavery Society meetings, and early on formed separate organizations of their own. The Philadelphia Female Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society Anti-Slavery Society was one of the first, founded in 1833, and the Grimké sisters were members. When criticized for speaking in public to “mixed” audiences of men and women in 1837, the Grimkés fiercely defended the right of women to participate in political discourse.

Seal of Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society

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Sparks Lit by Women Factory Workers

The Victorian aphorism that “a woman’s place is in the home” tried to make women feel good about their lot. In reality, their lives were an endless round of pregnancies, child-rearing and domestic duties. They worked hard and died young – often in childbirth.

For working class women, having their “place in the home” was an unattainable ideal. In the 1830s, numerous women worked in more than one hundred low-paying industrial occupations. They often worked for pennies an hour in unsafe factories, subjected to unregulated abuse from their bosses. They desired rights for women, too, but their goals focused on better pay and working conditions. And they were not afraid to take action.

Female textile workers in Lowell, Mass., led strikes in 1834 and 1836 for fair treatment and decent wages. In 1835, a strike in 20 Paterson, NJ textile mills involved more than 2,000 women and children seeking shorter working hours.

Ernestine Rose Ernestine Rose, a Polish Jewish immigrant to America in 1836, became an eloquent orator on the abolition of slavery, religious tolerance, public education, and equality for women. In 1838, she circulated petitions supporting a proposed New York state law to improve the civil rights of married women and to allow them to hold property in their own name.

At an 1851 national women’s rights convention she spoke about the legal death of women in marriage. She described the cases of two offenders brought before a Justice of New York:

“One was charged with stealing a pair of boots, for which he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment; the other crime was assault and battery upon his wife: he was let off with a reprimand from the judge! …The judge showed us the comparative value which he set on these two kinds of property.”

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The First Convention on Women’s Rights in 1848 Launches a Formal Movement

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and , attending an anti- slavery convention in London in 1840, were required, as women, to sit in the balcony. They refused to remain at the conference, and the seeds were planted for a formal movement to improve women’s rights.

In 1848, Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Mott planned the first major convention on women’s rights, in Seneca Falls, New York. It ignited a movement that expanded in the following decade, to push for the Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony reform of divorce and property laws, and the rights of citizenship. Without a vote and virtually invisible in the eyes of the law, women could not stand up for themselves, the new suffragists said, for they were nothing more than the property of men.

Finding a Voice

African American women, doubly oppressed by racism and sexism, found their own ways to join the battle for women’s rights as part of – and apart from – White women’s suffragist organizations. , and Cary and others spoke at national and state women’s rights conventions and meetings in the 1850s. Starting with church groups and the formation of Black women’s clubs, they provided support for their communities and raised money to fight slavery.

Harriet Tubman Library of Congress

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The Aftermath of the Civil War and the Fifteenth Amendment

During the Civil War, abolitionists and women’s suffrage activists, both White and African American, focused their attention on ending slavery. With the end of the war, arguments for woman suffrage became entwined with debates over the rights of formerly enslaved people and the meaning of citizenship. Before, voting status had been determined by the states. Now Congress proposed two federal amendments:

• The 14th Amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including former slaves—and guaranteed all citizens “equal protection of the laws”.

• The 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Sex was not mentioned. By defining the right to vote in a separate amendment, Congress implied that it was not synonymous with citizenship. The proposed Fifteenth Amendment created a challenge among suffragists – should they support it? Should they fight for African American women to be included? And if so, what about White women?

NWSA vs AWSA – Two Approaches

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had established the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) in 1866, “to secure Equal Rights to all American citizens, especially the right of suffrage, irrespective of race, color or sex.” Some of the more prominent reform activists of that time were members, including women and men, Blacks and Whites. Elizabeth Cady Stanton promoting the National Women’s Suffrage Association

But disagreement over support of the 15th Amendment led to a split. In 1869, Stanton, Anthony and Rose created the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), and and her husband, Henry Blackwell, formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA).

AWSA adopted a state-by-state approach

to winning the vote for women. NWSA Lucy Stone was more radical and controversial, and wanted a Constitutional amendment to secure the vote for women. 1868 Petition to New Jersey Legislature requesting rights for women

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Losing momentum, then gaining celebrity endorsements

Between 1870 and 1890, neither group achieved much success. A few states allowed women to vote in municipal or school board elections, but the entire movement was “in a rut.” Events were not well attended, and annual conventions did not attract new people. NWSA and AWSA merged in 1890, becoming the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Although nominally led by Stanton and Anthony, NAWSA generally adopted AWSA’s state-by-state approach to suffrage. Women’s clubs – a growing movement of their own throughout the country – continued to drive some momentum, but African American women were not welcome in the White women’s clubs so they formed their own organizations. They were unified in the fight for equality and support for their communities, especially in the South, where Jim Crow laws were quickly taking away any benefits of the 14th and 15th Amendments. In 1894, New York State was considering a constitutional amendment regarding women’s rights. To raise funds to generate support, NAWSA approached wealthy New York socialites Katherine Duer Mackay, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Anne Morgan and others. The donors thought that women’s suffrage needed to do a better job of appealing to the public and sought to brand and package it like a consumer product. The socialites’ celebrity – magnified by attention from the news media -- made involvement in the movement more acceptable to a broader range of people, including their wealthy male and female friends. The middle-class, civically minded women who had been in charge were not pleased by all the focus on these women in the press. But when Alva Belmont opened her Newport Above, top to bottom: mansion to the public and gave all the proceeds to NAWSA, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin , founder of the National Association of Colored Women, they could not protest. Katherine Duer Mackay Anne Harriman Vanderbilt

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Connecting with African American Suffragists in New York

Socialite Alva Belmont went a step further. Her own Political Equality Association was looking for support for the New York State constitutional amendment, and she and other White suffragists realized the importance of African American male voters and politically aware African American women.

Belmont approached Negro Women’s

Alva Belmont Business League president Irene Moorman. More than 200 African American women attended the first meeting at the Mt. Olivet Baptist Church with Belmont and Helen Frances Garrison Villard, a co-founder of National Association for the Advancement of Helen Frances “Fanny” Villard Colored People and the daughter of prominent publisher and abolitionist . Belmont provided African American suffragists with headquarters for a “colored” chapter in Harlem, Irene Moorman under the aegis of her organization.

Youthful new energy

Alice Paul, a Quaker like many of the movement’s leaders, was raised to believe in the equality of the sexes. Inspired by radical British suffragist Emmeline Pankhurst during a stay in England, Paul returned to the U.S. in 1910, at the age of 25, determined to reshape and re-energize the American campaign.

She joined NAWSA, and was quickly appointed as head of the Congressional Committee in charge of working for a federal suffrage amendment. In 1912, Paul and Lucy Burns went to Washington, D.C. and soon organized a publicity event to gain maximum national attention: a massive march by women on Pennsylvania Avenue the day before Woodrow Wilson’s presidential inauguration. She felt it was time for women to use political action to demand suffrage.

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The 1913 March on Washington

The March 3, 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession became the very first women’s march on Washington, and the first large, organized political march in the nation’s capital. Its purpose was to “march in a spirit of protest against the present political organization of society, from which women are excluded.” It drew 5,000 to 10,000 participants from all over the U.S. – as well as several European countries, New Zealand and India. The procession included floats, bands, and groups representing women at home, in school, and at work.

An enormous crowd of both supporters and hecklers gathered, and D.C. police failed to keep them under control. The marchers were finally assisted by citizens’ groups and eventually the cavalry. African American women, such as journalist and activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, at first were asked to march at the back of the parade, but ended up joining other marchers by state or profession.

The event was the start of Alice Thousands of people participated in the 1913 Woman Suffrage March on Washington Credit: Library of Congress Paul’s campaign to refocus the suffrage movement on obtaining a constitutional amendment.

Between 1913 and 1919, Paul’s and many other national and local organizations staged events and marches in Washington and other major cities across the country. The Women’s Political Union of Newark held a series of fund-raising balls, and East Orange staged a celebration in honor of Lucy Stone’s protest of “taxation without representation.”

In November 1914 a delegation of 73 New Jersey

women went to see President Wilson, who told Woman’s Journal and Suffrage News their leaders, “The subject is one in which I am deeply Credit: Library of Congress interested…[and] I will give it my earnest attention.”

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The 1915 Referendums

In 1915, four states – New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania – put the question of women’s suffrage to the voters in referendums. All were defeated by narrow margins, and the near misses gave momentum to the push for a federal amendment. The New Republic noted about the NJ vote: A radical amendment which can secure the support of 40% of the voters has a standing in public opinion which cannot be denied.

The New Jersey campaign received the support of President Wilson – although only two weeks ahead of the election. Nevertheless, the endorsement of a sitting president was a remarkable achievement by the New Jersey suffragists, especially in the face of a campaign by the New Jersey Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, which opposed the referendum in favor of preserving traditional definitions of womanhood.

More and more of the new western states were granting the vote to women, and a few midwestern and eastern states, including New York and Rhode Island, did as well by 1917. Paul and the National Women’s Party (NWP) began to move more aggressively to hold the Democratic Party, then in power in Washington, responsible for the passage of a federal amendment.

Silent Sentinels Continue the Fight

In 1917, Paul and other suffragists, calling themselves Silent Sentinels, began quietly picketing College Day in the picket line, 1917 outside the White House and continued until the 19th Amendment was passed. The intent of the protesters was to encourage President Wilson to support the federal suffrage amendment. Many observers encouraged the picketers, but anti- suffragists opposed them. Mobs sometimes attacked the Silent Sentinels.

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…and the Night of Terror

President Wilson largely ignored the protesters, but starting in June, police started arresting them on charges of obstructing traffic, although their protest was legal and non-violent. In July, 16 women, were arrested and sentenced to jail or to pay a fine. The women chose jail. Lucy Burns argued that the women should be treated as political prisoners. Suffragists force-fed in jail

As the number of women arrested grew, the prisoners were taken to Virginia’s Occoquan Workhouse, where conditions were abysmal and unsanitary. The women were physically abused, went on a hunger strike and were force-fed.

Suffragist Lucy Burns imprisoned in the Occoquan Workhouse On the night of November 14, 1917, known as the “Night of Terror”, the guards were ordered to brutalize the suffragists, beating them and throwing them against the walls.

The suffragists smuggled out information about their treatment, and it was widely covered in the newspapers. By November 28 all were released.

Protesters in front of the White House after the US entry into World War I

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Hard-Won Success at Last

An increasing number of states allowed women to vote by 1917 – and the power of those votes resulted in the election of many pro-suffrage Congressmen. On January 9, 1918, Wilson, pressured by the negative press about the protesters and growing support in Congress, announced his support for the 19th amendment. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives passed the amendment, and two weeks later, the Senate finally followed. With their work done in Congress, the suffragists turned their attention to getting 36 states to ratify the amendment.

New Jersey was the 29th state to do so, and Tennessee was the last. The 19th Amendment was officially ratified on August 26, 1920.

Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment on Aug. 18, 1920, and US Secretary of State Colby signed it into law on Aug. 26. (President Wilson was disabled by a stroke the previous year.) Credit: San Francisco Call

Alice Paul, national chairman of the Woman’s Party, unfurls the ratification banner at suffrage headquarters in Washington, on August 18, 1920 after Tennessee becomes the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, allowing the Amendment to pass into law on August 26. Credit: Library of Congress

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