Lecture: Feminism and the Suffrage Movement

1. The Suffrage Movement and Feminism
HIUS157/Prof. Rebecca Jo Plant

2. Suffrage movement, 1870s-1890
• Recap: Major organizational split in 1869
– American Women’s Suffrage Association
•Based in New England
•State by state approach
•Both women and men
– National Women’s Suffrage Association
•Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony
•Supported constitutional amendment
•Women’s organization

3. Doldrum years, 1870-1900
• Very little progress toward the vote
• Anomalies: Territories of WY and UT enfranchise
women in 1869 and 1870, but not out of concern for
equality
• Positive development: 1890 NAWSA (National
American Woman Suffrage Association) founded
– Re-united the movement
– Gave up on a constitutional amendment; focused on
states
• Still very few victories: Colorado (1893); ID (1896)
• Between 1896-1910: Not a single state granted women suffrage

4. New Momentum, 1900-1910s
• Suffrage became part of a broader “woman’s
movement”
• Movement re-energized, but also transformed
– Old leadership dying out
• Stanton dies in 1906; Anthony in 1910
– More young and working-class women joining
– More focused, but also more conservative
• Emphasis on “civic housekeeping” appealed to more traditional
women
• Southern strategy
– Reinvigoration of movement coincided with rise of US
imperialism abroad
• Supporters portray support for women’s rights a sign of
“civilization;” critics as a cultural imperialism

5. Maternalism and the suffrage
movement

6. Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947)
• Became head of
NAWSA in 1910
• Reached out to
WC/immigrant women
• 1900-15: 6 more states
gave win the vote
– CA, 1911
• “Winning Plan”

7. Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940)
• Daughter of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton
• Married a Brit
– Lost US citizenship
– Influenced by more radical
British suffrage movement
– And socialism
• Returned to US in 1907
• Founded the Equality
League of Self-Supporting
Women
– Cross-class alliances
– New, modern political tactics

11. Suffrage as a cause célèbre
Ethel Barrymore and Mary Pickford

12. Antis
• 1912: National Association Opposed to
Woman’s Suffrage formed in NY
– Led by the wealthy Josephine Dodge
– Argued suffrage would diminish women’s
moral influence
– Published a magazine, Woman’s Protest
– After 1917 engaged in red-baiting; suffragists =
socialists

14. Anti-suffrage
cartoons

17. Alice Paul (1885-1977)
• Federal amendment
• Congressional Union
(1916)
– Drew younger, more
militant group
• Conflict with NAWSA
• Centralized control, daring
demonstrations, pressuring
the party in power
• Led to another split: 1916
National Women’s Party

18. World War I
• Prior to the war, many suffragists had supported the
peace movement
• Some vocally opposed the war
– Jane Addams
• But Catt and NAWSA reversed course and lent
support to Wilson
– Expediency: If women supported the war effort, the
government could no longer refuse to give them the vote
• NWP continued to denounce Wilson
– Called him “Kaiser Wilson”
– Widely viewed as treasonous

20. Jan. 1918: Wilson finally
lent his support the
cause—as a “war
measure”
Summer 1919:
Congress passed the
19th
amendment
August 1920:
TN became the
36th
state to ratify—by
one vote!

22. But, the story didn’t end there
• Puerto Rican women—American citizens
since 1917, but did not get the vote until:
1929 (literate women); 1935 (all women)
• Filipina women
– Living under U.S. colonial rule, but did not get the
vote until a 1937 plebiscite
• Links between woman’s suffrage and
imperialism
– Some male nationalists portrayed as a US import

23. Women’s suffrage, worldwide
• 1893 New Zealand (still a colony)
• 1902 Australia (aboriginal women excluded)
• 1906 Finland
• 1913 Norway
• 1915 Iceland; Denmark
• 1917 Canada (not Quebec); USSR
• 1918 Germany; Austria; Netherlands;
Estonia; Latvia; Poland

24. Post-WWII
• 1950 India
• 1952 Greece
• 1972 Switzerland
• 1972 Bangladesh
• 1994 South Africa
• 2005 Kuwait
• 2006 United Arab Emirates
• 2015: Saudi Arabia (municipal elections)

25. Questions to contemplate
• Why does it take so long?
• Why do women finally get the vote when
they do?
• How had the meaning of suffrage changed
between 1848 and 1920?

27. Feminism
• Equal rights
• Emphasis on personal liberation; self-
fulfillment
– Challenging the idea of innate sexual differences;
freeing oneself from psychological shackles
• Economic independence
• Sexual emancipation

28. The Heterodoxy Club
• Incubator for feminist ideas
– 1912: Founded by Mary Jenney Howe in
Greenwich Village
– Hybrid group: part radical woman’s club, part
consciousness-raising group
• Many members led unconventional
domestic lives

29. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)
• Leading feminist intellectual of
her day
– Women and Economics (1898)
• Father had abandoned family
– Grew up in poverty
• Married at 24; had a child
– Suffered a severe nervous
breakdown
• Separated from her husband and
eventually divorced
– Relinquished custody of her child to
former husband

30. Gilman’s core beliefs
• Emphatic rejection of separate spheres
• Victorian “home” bad for women and
society: a drain on human progress
– Influenced by evolutionary theory
• Women should be economically self-
sufficient
– Rejected “family wage” ideal
• Domestic labor should be outsourced to
professionals

31. Emma Goldman (1869-1940)
• Escaped arranged
marriage by emigrating
to America
• Prominent anarchist
– Edited Mother Earth
• Criticized the suffrage
movement as too narrow
– Supported birth control
– Sexual emancipation
• Deported during the Red
Scare (1919)

32. “Red Emma” (1893)

33. What happens to feminism in
the 1920s?
• Co-opted by consumer culture?
– Emphasis on youth, pleasure, heterosexual
sociability
• Unanticipated outcomes
– Disillusionment
• System didn’t change dramatically
– Gradual decline of separate women’s
institutions that had given reformers an
institutional base