Women are owned by their husbands their property, they really don't have any recourse, which is why women are constantly pregnant in the 19th century, once the 19th Amendment is passed, that's the first hurdle for ratification of 36 states after it's approved, is the final hurdle that they have to get over the women when they're sitting on the house in the Senate chamber for and it's finally done. And when it passes, folks and women leave, and they're not cheering, they're not like, yes, we have the vote because they don't they now have this entire new battle. Their battlefield is out in the state.
The year 2020 has been history making to say the very least. But one thing that might be a bit overlooked is the fact that 100 years ago, the United States made an overdue bit of history with the 19th Amendment, which granted women right to vote in federal elections. This is random acts of knowledge presented by Heartland Community College, I'm your host, Steve fast. As voting rights issues still continue well into the 21st century, we're looking back at the women's suffrage movement. And today's guest says voting rights has always been a battle that has no clear cut line of victory.
Hi, I'm Christina Lee Smith, I teach for Community Education at Heartland Community College,
you teach a class on the history of women's suffrage. It's kind of been overlooked. And it's a little bit hard to believe with all this happening in 2020. But this year is the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote,
quite the milestone, it was a 75 year marathon. And it is a movement that is not linear in any sense of the word. Some historians look at the women's suffrage movement, beginning in the 1830s with the anti slavery convention in London, and other historians see it really being in 1848, in Seneca Falls, New York, where the very first National Women's Rights Association convention was held. And there was less than 300 people at that convention. But the movement over the course of all of those decades, even leading up to the to the 100th anniversary has never been linear it has brought in 1000s of women from all over the country leaders who have different ideas on how to achieve things who have come together and created organizations who have split apart through divisive issues that they were unable to agree upon and create other organizations that also sought suffrage, but through a different mechanism or a different way. And then those they would come back together and 20 or 30 years and join up again. And we really also see the 75 year marathon being three generations of women. It didn't all just happen in one person's lifetime. This is taking over the course of generations. And you will see the first generation of women in the 19th century not have those opportunities that you will find with what we call the new woman in the early 20th century. And some of the challenges they face are very different. So it's a very interesting movement altogether when you thread it all the way through.
Even though women couldn't vote there was still quite active politically, women were drivers, not just for suffrage, but other issues as well.
Even if you look back at the American Revolution, women were politically active because they would argue that we're not going to buy goods from Britain. Right. So they would boycott British goods, that is a political action that they were taking. So women have always taken political action in one way, shape or form. I do think it's interesting to note that just because women across the United States could not vote in presidential election does not mean that states did not allow women to vote at other levels. So when you look at the West, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado will actually be the first state to allow presidential election voting for women to states out west, when they went from territorial status to state status. They allowed women to vote at certain levels, whether that be municipal level or state level, or maybe just solely federal level only. So there's different variations of voting going on. But there are about 4 million women voting in 1918 primarily in the western states,
where women weren't allowed to vote. And during the suffrage movement, what were some of the rationales that were given by the opponents of suffrage to say, well, this is why women shouldn't be allowed the right to vote,
anti Suffrage Movement. Well, I will say this that at the root cause It's men saying that women shouldn't vote however there are women, influential women who said, are places in the home. Now these are women of means women of social status of power of wealth whose husbands hold very lucrative contracts with the government very high positions. General William Tecumseh Sherman, his wife is one of those women, Admiral doldrum. From the Civil War, his wife is one of those women. And they're saying no, we don't need the right to vote. Our men vote for us, our men take care of us, our places in the home. It's ironic coming from these women since they typically are the ones that have servants who do all the domestic housework and are not necessarily burdened in the same way that a lot of other women weren't. But they presume to speak for all women. There's also the brewing industry. The brewing industry did not want to give women have the right to vote because they would vote against them. They would vote for prohibition, they would vote to ensure that their husbands were no longer drinking and spending all their money and squandering it and not providing for their family. So you have the brewing interest in the Midwest, in the south. You've got white supremacist, right. I mean, you got Jim Crow going on throughout the South after reconstruction. So they're afraid of enfranchising women in general, because that gives black women the right to vote and black women are going to vote along with black men. And how do we you know, we already keeping the black men from not voting even though they have the 15th amendment. So there's that racist segregation activity going on in the south. And in the east, it's really going to be big business. It's going to be the industrial. Remember, women are working in factories, they're working 12 hour days, six days a week, child labor, women are bringing their children, they're working, and they have no rights. And by giving them the right to vote, you're giving them political rights to better their situation.
It's interesting that you mentioned the brewer's women were in many ways behind the temperance movement that led to prohibition.
And the temperance movement is very much tied in with the suffrage movement, very much like the abolitionists as well.
So it's interesting that you think of something that would be a fundamental American right, is always tied in with a lot of other divergent parties. But yet there were coalition's there.
And when prohibition goes into play with the 17th Amendment, remember the women's Amendment right to vote, the Susan B. Anthony amendment is the 19th amendment. So prohibition happened before women got the right to vote. So at that point, the brewing industries kind of gave up, right, they're not really against women voting at that point. So there is the shift in mentality or thought behind women's rights.
So we talked about a few of the anti suffrage figures in history, who are some of your favorite figures that we might not know about?
I'm a 19th century in the 20th century, my favorite 19th century person to talk about in regards to the suffrage movement, is Victoria wood Hall. Now, she is not like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Susan B. Anthony or Lucy Stone, these women who have dedicated their lives to decades and decades of organizing and speaking and moving the suffrage movement forward. But Victoria wood Hall was radical, and it brought attention to her. It brought attention to her actions. And by tying herself to the suffrage movement, it brought attention to the movement itself, sometimes not always in a good light. She's a very controversial figure. She is one who embraced free love. Now, a lot of people think free love means just being able to go out there and to do what you want with whomever you want. And that isn't the case. Free love is this 19th century concept where I don't have to get married, unless I love you. And at the point I stopped loving you, I no longer have to have sex with you because men own their wife and therefore they are you know, Elizabeth Cady Stanton used to say that being in a marriage, there is something called marital rape, or sexual freedom in a marriage. So free love says, If I'm no longer in love with you, I no longer have to stay married to you and I no longer have to have sex with you. And these are radical views. Women are owned by their husbands their property, they really don't have any recourse which is why women are constantly pregnant in the 19th century, they would go from pregnancy to pregnancy. So she is all for this free love movement. In fact, she never really married the man she was with. She grew up in a very carnival esque type of period where she would go from town to town her parents were how do I say her father was a con man. Her mother would prostitute her daughters out for Her and her sister, Tennessee. So she's this very radical figure. She embraces dress reform. She embraces birth control. She embraces reproductive freedom in general. And she ties herself to the movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Isabel feature hooker both attach themselves to her. I think that she can really she's an eloquent speaker. She's the very first woman to speak in Congress about suffrage. And so she is someone who embraces suffrage, but it's not her end goal, for in goal really is just women's rights in general. It's not just about the right to vote. I don't know if anyone's heard of the Beecher Tilden scandal in the 19th century. But she is the one that reveals the scandal of Henry Ward Beecher, you know, he's this minister the Beecher family is this prominent family. And Henry Ward Beecher is this minister, and he has 1000s of people that comes to the church, and he is this great orator of the 19th century. And he is preaching all of these religious things about family and love and marriage, but yet he's having an affair on the side. And she exposes that. And so she's a very controversial character, but I love her because she is tied to that Suffrage Movement. And there are women within that movement that love her and love what she can bring to it. She's also a spiritualist, she believed that she could talk to the dead, you know, 19th century Spiritualism is a quasi religious movement, and people truly believed in it. And she believed that she could speak across the veil, so to speak. So she's my 19th century. suffragettes that I think is just really interesting to learn more about. And the 20th century is Alice Paul, Alice Paul is undeniably radical. For her time, she actually went to England, and she met with suffragettes over there by the name of Emmeline Pankhurst and they really had this militant style of pushing their message of a women's right to vote. And it wasn't necessarily violent, you know, militant doesn't mean violent or nonviolent. It's just a way of radically displaying their actions. She brings that back to the United States. And she starts picketing in front of the White House, and they get arrested and they get mugged. And they get attacked, and they get beaten, but they will never fight back. And they're thrown in these jails, these farm work houses in Virginia, and they decide they're going to go on a hunger strike. They starve themselves for days and weeks at a time. And the prison warden is ruthless to them. They get beaten, they get stripped down naked, they're not given their clothes back. They are force fed through their nose. And the press gets a hold of this. And it's unbelievable. People are appalled that women are being treated in such a fashion. And she uses that propaganda to her benefit to push the movement forward. Now there's another side of the movement that doesn't agree with Alice Paul. But Alice Paul pushes and pushes, she has a parade in Washington, DC the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration. She makes everything a spectacle. She wants everything to be out there and visible and for people to talk about it and to report on it. And she did that through her militant style of picketing, and just forcing the suffrage issue forward. I really believe there is a period in the suffrage movement from about 8096 to 9010. Where it's very stagnant. There's nothing going on. No state out there ratify suffrage at the state level. It's just really dormant. And Alice Paul revives it. And it's her militancy that that idea of action is better than words. And she really pushes that movement forward. So she is by far my favorite 20th century suffered.
You mentioned that rather extreme example of physical abuse. What were some of the other elements of pushback, either from the state or from individuals against women suffragists.
Remember an instance where Alice Paul and the picketers are outside in front of the White House. And there are people in suits, and obviously, office workers, and they're coming out of government buildings, and they're coming over, and they're throwing things at the picketers and they're knocking them down in there, and they're just attacking them. And in this militant style, it turns out that possibly Woodrow Wilson may have somehow or maybe someone on his staff may have orchestrated behind the scenes to have people from the War Department, the State Department, the Navy Department to come out. And Woodrow Wilson is a Democrat. And so all of a sudden you have Republican Congressmen wanting to investigate that and all of a sudden it stops the very next day. There's a little conspiracy theory Are you there that you wonder how far Woodrow Wilson would go? That's one example I can think of. Another example is during the 1930s parade in Washington, DC, it's this grand parade that's happening, hundreds of 1000s of people don't tend to see it. And crowds are upset. Just the people in general, a lot of men are upset that women are out there and they're dressed the way they are. For instance, I miss milholland is on this horse and she's dressed as like this Aphrodite Athena Greek goddess. It's cold out, she's just scattered, Lee clad, and men are not happy to see women act in such a manner. And so they viciously attack the parade route as well. Unfortunately, the Washington DC police did not act accordingly. They almost ignored it until the US Army came in and basically saved them. So there are those types of acts.
Anytime that you see organizing to push for some big change. It does seem that there are organized elements of pushing back and we see that again and again in history. One of the things that I'm curious about is, after the 15th amendment passed, it wasn't all clear sailing for African Americans to vote or to have the rights that would seemingly be granted by that amendment. Were there any sort of measures against women that would try to overturn their right to vote once it became legal.
A lot of politicians don't want the federal amendment. And so what they try to do is they try to rewrite the state constitution or hold referendums that says, We're not going to address this at this time. They try to fight it at the state level, especially in the South. They don't want the federal government to dictate to them that women have a right to vote, they want to handle that at the state level. They see that as overreaching by the federal government. They don't want that level of oversight. In fact, there are going to be women in the south, Kate Gordon of Louisiana, and Lucy Clay of Kentucky are the two I can think of right off the top of my head. These are white supremacist women, and they live in the south, and they're all for suffrage, but they ended up being anti suffrage people. And they had these campaigns where they're against women getting the right to vote, if it means black women have the right to vote, because they don't want black enfranchisement, they want to again, continue the Jim Crow laws down in the south. So I think that's a big push as well. There is the question once the 19th Amendment is passed, you know, first of all, that's that's the first hurdle ratification of 36 states after it's approved, is the final, the final hurdle that they have to get over. And the women when they're sitting on the house in the Senate chamber floor, and it's finally done, right. I mean, this is May 1919. The 66 Congress has called you know, Woodrow Wilson has called the special session of Congress to come in to solely talk about suffrage. And so they have to pass it in both the House again and to the Senate. And when it passes, both women leave, and they're not cheering. They're not like, yes, we have the vote because they don't, they now have this entire new battle. Their battlefield is out in the States, and they start sending women left and right picket state, you go to Idaho, you go to North Dakota, you go to Tennessee, you go to Illinois, and they're trying to ensure that all the states will ratify that constitutional amendment, because without 36 states, they can't. Well, the anti suffrage people are moving as fast as the suffrage women. And the last state to ratify the 36. One was Tennessee. And it was definitely something out of a criminal investigative type of story. Because literally politicians are almost being kidnapped. They're being applied with liquor. They're being secret ID away. They're having special meetings there. There's all these backdoor things going on to prevent these politicians from going in and voting yes, for the suffrage movement. And when Tennessee votes yes, and it becomes the 36. Right away the anti suffrage people file a federal lawsuit against it.
After that Amendment was ratified. It didn't stop women's rights advocates continue to seek out equal rights. And I think sometimes people think that some of the movements that were made in the 60s and 70s led to one big sweeping amendment, they go right to it. You didn't really see that kind of action. We
still don't have the amendment today. So unfulfilled, you're right. So you know, what difference did suffrage make? I think that's that's a great question. What difference did sufferers really make? First of all, democracy begins with the right to vote. But it doesn't end there. There are still political rights that need to continue to grow and to evolve. Now, the 19th Amendment definitely signaled the largest single enfranchisement of half the population that had been considered second class citizens. That's great. But that's where men really saw this, okay, women's got the rights to vote, it's all over with. And women are thinking we have the right to vote now we can begin. So there's two different mentalities within the nation itself on where the right to vote is really going to take people. So it's the beginning, it's not the conclusion. And the suffrage organizations, once the amendments pass, or once it's ratified, they really start reforming themselves into the birth control, movement, reproductive freedom, all of these other types of rights, that they're seeking divorce marriage, so forth. I think it's interesting because the anti suffrage people, you know, right after women are granted the right to vote, and that first presidential election in 1924 passes, they're thinking women should vote in the same vein that men vote in terms of numbers, you have the right to vote, so therefore you need to get out and vote. And I think that's a great idea. And that's where all women's suffrage people wanted it to move to. But not all women in America were suffrage workers were on the ground, knew what that meant. There are many hundreds of 1000s of women who had no idea what the vote meant to them, and who had never been involved politically before in their lives. So there is this political inexperience within a lot of women out there. And they really had to learn what that meant for them individually. So women did not turn out in the numbers that everyone thought they were. And so therefore, a lot of people thought it was a failure. Why do we give them the right to vote if they don't turn out to vote? I think that's an interesting argument when not all men vote, but you still allow men to vote for it. They still have that right. And nobody questions it. So for some women, it came very slowly. I also think the suffrage movement, intertwined women in such a way that they formed the sisterhood. Good look at Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. They were friends for decades until they die. And the women of the second generation also knew each other, and they may not have been as close as that first generation. But once suffrage was achieved, it almost divided them. Because now, once they voted, they're voting on party on summer voting democratic, some are voting Republican, some are liberal, some are conservative. And then there's the whole race and socio economic lines. Now they're being divided. So what the suffrage movement had done to bring these women together, the right to vote, almost in a very big sense, pull them apart, because now they have political rights where they can start pursuing other things. One of the things I want to mention that I don't think it's talked about a lot, it really ties to today's political climate, is the ways in which African American women were treated during the suffrage movement. Initially, in the 19th century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, probably the three of the the big movers and shakers of the 19th century, they were all tied with the abolitionist anti slavery folks. Basically, that meant the Republican Party. And once the Civil War is over, and we're in reconstruction, Congress, which is run by the Radical Republicans at the time party of Lincoln, they come up with the 14th Amendment, which says anybody born in the United States is a citizen. That didn't happen till after the Civil War. It also defined citizen in there in the 14th amendment. It defines what a citizen is. And so the women, in their mind think, well, that means we're a citizen of the United States. We, therefore should be granted equal rights to men. Well, here comes the 15th Amendment and the 15th Amendment is allowing African American men the right to vote. And that's where the suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement diverge, right? They start to pull apart, they come together for so long, and then all of a sudden they break apart. Because there are some women who say, yes, we agree with you. It's not our time. We'll wait. We'll allow African American men the right to vote first. And there's other women that says no, the 14th Amendment says I'm a citizen, I have the right to vote. It needs to be universal. And so this is where we first see the women's suffrage movement. Take a road all by itself. Nobody really tends to think about the black woman She's doubled, disenfranchised, based on race and gender. Now, Elizabeth Cady Stanton is a woman of means. She grew up in a wealthy family. She has a great education, her husband's a politician and lawyer, she's had that political education. She is a great speaker. But she said some things in the 19th century that can be seen as nativist and racist. She didn't like immigrants, she did not think that immigrant men who are typically ignorant and drunk should have the right to vote over her. And she also did not believe that black woman necessarily needed the right to vote as well with black men. So she did make some disparaging remarks and statements, she had a strategy that if she could push suffrage, and get it through for her to see the right to vote, that she wanted to have an educational qualification or requirement that says you need to be educated. Well, that is going to eliminate a lot of women from that qualification. So you're going to see race and socioeconomic status come into play there. And then there's this southern strategy that I mentioned, where women and men did not want to enfranchise women at all for fear of having the black woman vote. And then in the 1913 parade, Alice Hall, the radical suffragette, who organized this parade. She was so determined on a federal amendment that she did not want black women marching in the parade. And you have to love Ida wells Barnett, who was an African American from Chicago, she had been writing about lynching. She was a member of the NAACP, very radical from an African American suffragettes perspective. And she goes to the parade in Washington, DC. And LSL says, We you guys can't march and she says, I am marching. And so the Illinois delegation is marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, and Ida is in the crowd off to the side. And all of a sudden, she just marches through those people and comes right out in the street and stands right in the middle of two of her allies in the Chicago delegation and she marches in the parade. I mean, they were so afraid of the racial backlash, especially in Washington, DC it was so tumultuous at that time, that they just were going to eliminate African Americans altogether. But she wanted her voice and her actions to be seen and heard and she, she got right in.
Christina Lee Smith teaches history courses for the continuing education department at Heartland Community College. For other interviews on history, culture, and more. Subscribe to random acts of knowledge via Apple podcasts, Spotify, audio boom, or wherever you found this one. Thanks for listening
