VESTING WOMEN WITH THE VOTE: THE TIMING OF THE FEDERAL AMENDMENT FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE A Thesis by Christine Ann Farrell Bachelor’s Degree, Earlham College, 1992 Submitted to the Department of History and the faculty of the Graduate School of Wichita State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts December 2007 © Copyright 2007 by Christine Ann Farrell All Rights Reserved VESTING WOMEN WITH THE VOTE: THE TIMING OF THE FEDERAL AMENDMENT FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE I have examined the final copy of this thesis for form and content, and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts with a major in History. _____________________________ Robin Henry, Committee Chair We have read this thesis and recommend its acceptance: _____________________________ George Dehner, Committee Member _____________________________ Doris Chang, Committee Member iii DEDICATION In memory of my grandparents, James and Barbara Farrell iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to my thesis advisor, Robin Henry, for guiding me through the diverse literature on women’s history. My readings with her kindled an enlightened understanding of American political culture. I also hold in very high esteem George Dehner, a devoted educator, who, during the course of my graduate studies, has affected me intellectually on a profound level. I also wish to extend my gratitude to Doris Chang for her positive interest in an unorthodox argument as well as for her keen insight and kind support. v ABSTRACT The purpose of this research was to determine the catalyst for the enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment. A ‘top-down’ approach to women’s political history – an unconventional interpretation of woman suffrage from the vantage point of the government within the context of American political culture – illumined women’s enfranchisement. In order to ascertain the premise of American political culture, this research incorporated a vast temporal scope: investigating the political ideology that informed American constitutionalism was integral to discovering the reason why, ultimately, the federal government bestowed unto women the franchise. The decisions of the executive and legislative branches reflected the ideology inherent in the U.S. Constitution. The framers not only incorporated many of the rights found in the British common law and in Magna Carta, but also the vested rights premise found in feudalism. Reciprocity of rights and obligations between the government and the citizenry enabled government protection: a citizen had to prove his civic worth in order to earn the privilege of the franchise. This value system resonated throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In sum, because of the simultaneous historical occurrences of a diplomatic suffrage leader, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, her active membership in the Committee on Women’s Defense Work of the Council of National Defense during the Great War, and a president, Woodrow Wilson, who was amenable to Catt’s methodology, women were enfranchised because of their invaluable contributions to the war effort. In this way, women’s war service proved their civic capacity to government officials which enhanced their standing for the franchise. Primary source materials from Wilson, government officials, and top military brass attest to this finding. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. HISTORIOGRAPHY 9 III. QUALIFYING THE VOTE: EARLY AND ANTEBELLUM U.S. POLITICAL CULTURE 41 IV. DISCORDANT VOICES: FROM THE CIVIL WAR TO THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY 64 V. CATT, THE DEA EX MACHINA: THE GREAT WAR 91 VI. CONCLUSION 136 BIBLIOGRAPHY 138 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. Drawing of a Red Cross Nurse and Uncle Sam, 1917 113 2. Photo of the Woman’s Committee, Council of National Defense, c. 1917 116 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS HWS History of Woman Suffrage LWSA Life And Work Of Susan B. Anthony NAWSA National American Woman Suffrage Association NWP National Woman’s Party PWW Papers of Woodrow Wilson ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The enactment of the Nineteenth Amendment is worthy of historical analysis because the right to the franchise, to date, is women’s only constitutional protection. Indeed, the government’s position on the franchise, as to whether it was a right, or rather a privilege, is symptomatic of how that government incorporated the citizenry into political society. In order to understand the meaning of the franchise in the American republic it is incumbent upon the historian first to elucidate the etymology of the term, ‘franchise.’ This Middle English word originated from the old French, fraunchise. According to the Middle English Dictionary, this word had myriad connotations; however, the interpretive implications of fraunchise resonated over the centuries into the Early Republic. While the archetypal definition was “freedom (as opposed to servitude), the social status of a freeman (whether by birth or manumission),” and a concomitant definition was “the right to land,” scholars discerned that, specifically, the electoral franchise, as in the election of a mayor, was a privilege, thus, by implication, it was not a right.1 During the history of the United States, the government and its citizenry wrestled over this right versus privilege dichotomy as to the nature of the franchise. While government policy makers perpetuated feudalistic common law, which they premised on American constitutionalism, the citizenry clung to a misguided understanding of John Locke’s doctrine of natural law. This battle of ideas manifested itself among congressional legislators and the woman suffrage movement respectively. The historian Nancy Isenberg, who wrote Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (1998), is a leading light in my examination of the woman suffrage amendment, which I analyze holistically. I did not grapple with a myopic interpretation 1Hans Kurath, ed., Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1953), 865, 866. Kurath quotes the Middle English text from which he derives his interpretations. 1 of the passage of this amendment; I chose instead to consider the basic political and cultural context of the nation in order to fathom the particular sequence of events that led to women’s enfranchisement in 1920. Isenberg astutely observes how the two time-honored documents of the American republic informed the disparate premises of the activists and the government. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, in order to declare a change in the locus of sovereignty, in light of Locke’s natural rights doctrine in his Two Treatises; later that century, the framers wrote the Constitution within the context of a privileged rights political culture wherein the citizenry must prove a vested stake in society in order to attain constitutional rights. Isenberg then illumines a second women’s rights movement during the nineteenth century: while the commonly known Seneca Falls movement premised their claim to the vote upon the philosophy behind the Declaration of Independence, Paulina Wright Davis’ 1850 Worcester Convention premised its ideology on that of the Constitution. Davis argued that in order to win the vote, women must obtain a quid pro quo relationship with the state: women must prove their vested stake in society, for that is how men earned their constitutional rights, by means of their civic capacity, such as by their landownership, taxpayer capacity, public works, or military service. Implicitly, perpetuating a claim to the vote premised on natural rights would prove to be a fruitless endeavor; such a claim would fall on deaf ears.2 I apply Isenberg’s antebellum analysis of suffrage activism to that of Wilson’s wartime administration. I argue that women earned the right to the vote because they had displayed their civic capacity during a time of national urgency: women won the franchise as a reward for their 2Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998); John Locke, Two Treatises Of Government, With Supplement, Patriarcha By Robert Filmer, The Hafner Library Classics, no. 2, with intro. Thomas I. Cook (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1947); and Kathleen S. Sullivan, Constitutional Context: Women and Rights Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America, The Johns Hopkins Series In Constitutional Thought, eds. Sanford Levinson and Jeffrey K. Tulis (Balitmore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). 2 war services. Upon President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, shrewd suffrage activism, via Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association [NAWSA], raised the consciousness of the executive and legislative branches of government as to women’s invaluable war services, such as nursing near the battle zone and as substitute labor for the domestic production of food and ammunition, not only for American soldiers in France but also for domestic sustenance and economic survival. Both the military top brass as well as the Department of Labor underscored the need for including women in the war effort. Also as a member of the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense, Carrie Catt initiated to Wilson the idea of woman suffrage as a war measure; because of Catt and her colleagues in NAWSA, Wilson incrementally attenuated his antisuffrage inclinations and eventually responded to her cordial but persistent exhortations with the endorsement of the federal amendment to congressional and state legislators. Wilson continued to advocate for suffrage as a reward even after the Armistice in November 1918. The Great War served as a crucible for testing the reciprocal rights and obligations value system of the American political culture: in return for women’s sacrifices to bolster the fortitude of the nation in war, the government granted women the privilege of the franchise.3 Conversely, I argue against the notion that women won the vote because of the militant suffragism that Alice Paul, leader of the National Woman’s Party [NWP], espoused.