Votes for Women: The Battle of August 1920

As is being widely publicized this month, women in the U.S. were given the universal right to vote 100 years ago this week, on August 18, 1920, when Tennessee became the 36^th state to ratify the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

June posing as a 1920 suffragist

Women’s Voting Rights before 1920

Women in most of the U.S. states did not have the right to vote in presidential elections before 1920.

For example, my paternal grandmother was born in 1881, so she turned 21, the voting age for men back then, in 1902. In the presidential election of 1904, though, she could not go to the polls with her husband George, whom she had married earlier that year.

Grandma Laura Seat was also unable to vote in the elections of 1908, 1912, or 1916. In the Declaration of Independence, the words “all men are created equal” still meant men instead of people 140 years later.

At the July 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton adopted the motto, “All men and women are created equal,” and they demanded the right to vote. That still hadn’t happened 68 years later when Grandma Laura was not legally permitted to vote in 1916.

But the situation changed in August 1920.

The Suffs and the Antis in 1920

The U.S. Congress passed the 19^th Amendment on June 4, 1919—but it had to be ratified by 36 of the 48 states in order to become part of the Constitution. The battle for and against ratification in Tennessee, the 36^th state, was fiercely fought in August 1920.

That battle between the “Suffs” (those for women’s suffrage) and the “Antis” (those opposing suffrage, which included many women) is engagingly told in Elaine Weiss’s 2018 book The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. And what a battle it was!

The strong women Antis emphasized several dangers the 19^th Amendment posed, including the dismantling of “white supremacy, states’ rights, and cherished southern traditions” (Weiss, p. 44).

Somehow, I had not previously realized how so much of the opposition to women’s suffrage was by southerners, still indignant over the outcome and effects of the Civil War and adamantly opposed to Black women gaining voting rights.

The Antis also included many women who were part of the conservative Christian evangelicalism of the South and linked with the fundamentalism that was growing in strength throughout the 1910s.

Among many other things, the Antis attacked the Suffs because of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898).

On the other hand, the Suffs were single-minded in their advocacy for women’s suffrage—and, regrettably, because of that single-mindedness they compromised on other matters of social justice, especially with regard to the rights of African Americans.

But, could the 19^th Amendment have been ratified otherwise? Perhaps not. Thankfully, it was ratified by Tennessee on August 18 and took effect on August 26, 1920. Surprisingly, though, most women didn’t vote in the November election that year.

What About 2016 & 2020?

It is reported that in the 2016 presidential election, 63.3% of eligible women voters went to the polls but only 59.3% of eligible men voters did.

Given the 72-year struggle (from 1848 to 1920) for voting rights, though, why would nearly 37% of women not vote in the last presidential election? Perhaps some of them still agreed with the Antis of 1920, although surely almost all women today think they should have the right to vote.

If just a small percentage of those women who didn’t go to the polls had done so, the 2016 election would likely have turned out differently, for of those women who did vote, 54% of them voted for Clinton whereas 53% of men voted for Trump.

In this centennial year of women’s suffrage, many of us are hoping that a far greater number of women will vote on November 3. “Votes for women” didn’t elect a woman president in 2016, but voting women can (and probably will!) make Senator Kamala Harris the first female vice president in U.S. history.

Another Good Candidate for the New $10 Bill

A couple of months ago I suggested (here) that Jane Addams would be a good choice for the new $10 bill, which will have a woman’s picture on it. This article is about another woman who is also a strong candidate for the proposed new bill to be released in 2020.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an outstanding 19th-century woman who perhaps is not widely known today. But she was a woman of considerable ability and significance, so she certainly would not be a bad choice for the woman to appear on the new $10 bill.

Elizabeth Cady was born 200 years ago this week, on November 12, 1815. She died in 1902, less than three weeks before her 87^th birthday. Her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, was published five years before her death and tells much about her remarkable life.

At the time of her birth, Elizabeth’s father, a lawyer in New York, was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. As a young woman, discussing legal matters with her father and reading his law books caused Elizabeth to realize how disproportionately the law favored men over women—and particularly over married women.

Seeking to change such laws became one of her main goals in life.

In 1840, Elizabeth married Henry Stanton, a journalist who later studied law under his father-in-law and who also became a lawyer. The Stantons became the parents of seven children between 1842 and 1859.

In spite of having a large family—and she seems to have been a good mother—Elizabeth Stanton spent much of her life working for social causes. She was an abolitionist and also a very active member of the temperance movement, working against what she saw as the evils of alcohol.

But she became best known as a leader in the women’s suffrage movement.

Elizabeth’s first involvement in the women’s movement was in 1848. The Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention, was held in July of that year. It was organized by Quaker women in Seneca Falls, New York, and by Elizabeth who was not a Quaker. (She and Henry had moved to Seneca Falls, New York, in 1847.)

She was the main author of “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document presented to that convention. It includes these words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal” (emphasis added).

Elizabeth met Susan B. Anthony in 1851, and they became lifelong friends and staunch colleagues in the women’s movement. (Anthony might be even a stronger candidate than Stanton for the new $10 bill, but her image already appears on the little-used one dollar coin, first minted in 1979.)

The Woman’s Bible is a two-part book written by Elizabeth and a committee of 26 women. The first volume was published in 1895, the year Elizabeth turned 80, and the second volume in 1898. It was written mainly to challenge the traditional position of religious orthodoxy that women should be subservient to men.

Elizabeth wrote the first essay, which was about Genesis 1:26-28. Her conclusion: “The above texts plainly show the simultaneous creation of man and woman, and their equal importance in the development of the race” (p. 8).

To this day most people seem to emphasize the second chapter of Genesis, where Eve is created from Adam’s rib and considered his “helpmeet” (from a misunderstanding of Genesis 2:20).

What a shame that so many today do not have as good an understanding of the Bible as Elizabeth Cady Stanton had 120 years ago!

Clarina Nichols, Frontier Feminist

Like many of you, for many years I have known the names of and something about leading U.S. feminists such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815~1902) and Susan B. Anthony (1820~ 1906). However, I knew nothing about Clarina Nichols, another outstanding feminist, until rather recently.

But Clarina is also a woman definitely worth knowing about.

Fairly recently, June and I have become friends with Diane Eickhoff and her husband Aaron Barnhart. After becoming acquainted with Diane, I found out that she had written a book titled Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights (2006).

I decided to read Diane’s book and discovered that not only was it very well written, but Ms. Nichols was also a remarkable woman. I was happy to learn about her life and achievements.

Clarina Irene Howard was born in Vermont on January 25, 1810. At the age of 20, she married Justin Carpenter, who turned out to be a weak man, unable to provide for his wife and their three children. They separated in 1839, and her divorce in 1843 was granted on the basis of “cruelty, unkindness, and intolerable severity.”

Clarina then married George Nichols, a newspaper editor and a widower twenty-eight years her senior. Clarina became an editor alongside, and then in place of, her husband, and from that position became one of this country’s earliest advocates for women’s rights.

In 1854 she pulled up stakes to pioneer in “bleeding Kansas” when that part of the country was enmeshed in the struggle over slavery, another issue that greatly concerned her. 

According to Diane, “As an independent, self-supporting woman, . . . she challenged conservative clergy, championed abused wives, and changed laws affecting women in several states.”

Clarina Nichols died 130 years ago this past Sunday, on January 11, 1885. Interestingly, Alice Paul was born on that very same day. Alice grew up to be an indefatigable advocate for women’s suffrage, which Clarina dreamed of and worked for so laboriously but without success.

Finally, because of Alice’s efforts, along with those of many others, in 1920 women in this country finally were given the right to vote, 35 years after Clarina’s death.

Some of you might be interested in reading Diane’s book. And some of you might have already seen, or may want to see, Iron Jawed Angels, the engaging 2004 film about Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and their struggle that led to the passage of the 19^th Amendment.

Ms. Paul is admirably played by talented actress Hilary Swank. (Last June when I was in Maloy, Iowa, visiting Brian Terrell whom I wrote about here, I heard that Hilary Swank’s father, Steve who had grown up in Ringgold County where Maloy is located, had bought the old Catholic church in that village and lives in the former church rectory.)

It was because of women such as Clarina and Alice that all U.S. women finally acquired voting rights. But there is still a long way to go for there to be gender equality in this nation. For example, in the 114^th U.S. Congress that convened for the first time this month, there are 84 women in the House of Representatives and 20 women serving in the Senate.

But even though women make up half of the population, women still comprise only about 20% of those serving in Congress. That percentage is growing, though—and from what I hear there is a strong possibility that the next POTUS will be a woman.