The leaders of the women’s suffrage campaign were Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
They found themselves without their former allies, the abolitionists, and in 1869 they formed the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), specifically focused on women’s suffrage.
- Membership restricted to women only.
- Campaigned for national change.
- Took a broader view and adopted a feminist line, opposing male domination in a number of spheres, e.g. employment.
- Didn’t ‘disallow’ black members but allowed the organisation in local states to decide whether they’d include black members. Laissez-faire.
The old link with abolitionism was maintained by a rival organisation led by Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe, called the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in 1869.
- Membership included men.
- Focused on voting in individual states, in state legislatures.
- Only focused on the voting issue.
- Allowed black people.
In 1890, the two organisations merged to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA).
However the subsequent splits weakened the cause and many women put their energies into temperance and social reform as an alternative.
Progress in the pre-War period
The federal political structure gave women more opportunities to make progress.
Some territories granted women the right to vote as early as 1869:
Wyoming in 1869, Utah in 1870. (Wyoming only became a state 1890, Utah 1896)
- This was because they needed women to work, to farm the land, to incentivise women to move to these Mid-Western areas they gave them the right to vote.
- In Utah specifically, the Mormons wished to show that polygamy did not mean women were exploited or had no rights, and some Mormon women were enthusiastic workers for the franchise.
The Voting Issue
To test the 14th and 15th Amendments, Anthony and c. 150 other women tried to vote in 1871 and 72.
- Ignoring the ruling by polling officials, they registered, voted and then were arrested and tried for electora malpractice. The judge refused them the right to speak, told the jury to find them guilty of violating voting rules and fined them.
Minor v. Missouri 1875
- In a legal challenge in 1875 when Virginia Minor sued the state of Missouri for preventing her from voting, the Supreme Court ruled that women were not allowed national voting rights, but states could give women the right to vote.
vBy 1890, the suffrage campaigners had managed to get eight states to hold a vote on the issue, but in all of these, the reformers were defeated.
States that gave women the vote before 1920 included:
- Arizona 1912 (also became a state early 1912)
- California 1911
- Colorado 1893
- Idaho 1896
- Montana 1914
- Nevada 1914
- New Mexico territory 1910 (school board elections)
- Oregon 1912
- Utah territory 1895
- Washington 1910
- 1917
Throughout the late 1880s into the early 1900s, there was small but steady progress on voting on local issues, but these were hedged with restrictions.
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- Twenty states permitted only widows with school-age children to vote and, even then, hostile crowds often prevented women from casting their votes.
Many men saw women voting as unnatural and a distraction from their domestic duties.
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- The basis of campaigning shifted from democratic arguments that women should have equal rights, to the practical advantages of women being used to looking after households and so being suitable for dealing with domestic and family issues such as temperance.
- Often arguments were based not on ideas of natural justice and inequality, but on arguments that women needed to influence laws to help them with working conditions, to ban alcohol, to help social reforms, or to be involved with matters to do with raising children.Opposition to women’s suffrage
The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage (NAOWS)– established in 1911, was one of the largest and was supported by a special journal called The Remonstrance.
The groups saw women’s rights as eroding the special place and respect for women in their work in the home, in raising children and working for good causes.
- They feared that political equality would work against the interests of women who were happy with their existing status as ‘angels of the hearth’ and cherished by their menfolk.
- Opposition built up in other ways, for example:
- Among some immigrants, Catholics, supported by their priests, saw suffrage reform as weakening the family.
- Southern Democrats disliked female suffrage, fearing that women in politics would introduce labour laws which might hurt the South, or work against the restrictions it had imposed on African Americans. (Such as the Jim Crow laws)
- Suffrage reformers faced the re-emergence of ideas that women had a separate sphere and their role was in the home, not politics.