A More Perfect Union: the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage

I was asked to give a sermon for the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, the Women’s Suffrage Amendment. I read about Susan B Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others. Their stories have been told a lot this past year, because they started an enormous movement and worked hard for their whole lives to give women the right that many others now take for granted. But the fourth principle of Unitarian Universalism kept nagging me, as I hope it nags all Unitarian Universalist historians. The fourth principle encourages us to undertake “A Free and Responsible Search for Truth and Meaning.” So, is the accepted, mainstream story of women’s suffrage the authentic truth? I felt compelled to engage with the subject of women’s suffrage and try to responsibly search for the truth behind the 19th amendment, and face the change that any discoveries would bring to my understanding of this powerful movement.

Before the Civil War, women’s rights covered multiple women’s issues, including wives’ rights and the custody of children. But the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the fallout from those amendments, rocked women’s rights groups in the United States:

The 14th Amendment, in 1863, states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The 15th Amendment, in 1869, states that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Based on these two amendments, women should have had the vote in 1869. The language is quite clear: everyone is a citizen, and every citizen gets to vote. Except that it didn’t translate to the rights that women expected. Women attempted to exercise their Constitutionally mandated right to vote and were denied at every turn. They were considered citizens, yes, but had no legal rights because their fathers and later, husbands, held those rights in their stead. This is a legal concept called couverture, and it was a huge part of English law after it was codified in the early 1700s. This complicated the idea of universal suffrage because women were not their own legal entities. How could someone who was defined by her lack of rights, be given the right to vote? And how, if the 14th and 15th amendments brought the rights of citizenship and suffrage to male slaves, did it not then cover women as well?

This paradox brought the women’s rights movement to laser-like focus on suffrage. Some women knew very well that they deserved the right to vote and that while the Constitution was getting closer to and closer to acknowledging them as full citizens, the people who enforced or ignored the Constitution were not ready. It would take 50 years of work — and three more Constitutional amendments on income tax, elections, and prohibition of alcohol — before a patchwork of state voter equality laws finally pressured the Congress to enact a Constitutional amendment that “allowed” women to vote. Fully twenty states had laws allowing women to vote before it was passed on a federal level. Every state had been fought for, tooth and nail.

Sojourner Truth, when giving a speech in 1851 at one of the earliest women’s rights rallies, said “[White] man is in a tight place; the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, and he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard.” As a Black woman and former slave, she understood something that many white women in the audience had a hard time internalizing: the men in their lives might have been loving fathers, doting husbands, loyal brothers. But to many white men, the advancement of the rights of others signaled the contraction of their own rights. This is ludicrous of course; today we see the same arguments against marriage equality or immigration, and the arguments are equally weak. As they say, freedom is not a pie. Everyone can have some and there is still an infinite amount left to enjoy. Sojourner was probably not surprised to see how long and hard women had to work in order to wrest the right to vote from men — in fact, she died several years before women achieved the vote at all. Having been a slave in New York State at a time when slaves there were supposed to be freed, in the end she ran away, claimed her freedom herself, and took her former master to court to gain the freedom of her son (she won). She wasn’t afraid of a fight. In 1851 she warned the women around her that in order to get the vote they would have to be more than women: they would have to be hawks.

The opposition to women’s suffrage was fierce. Political cartoons were incredibly popular after the Civil War, and as the suffrage campaign started to gain traction after 1900, cartoonists used their medium to attack women on several fronts. It was a widely held belief, by both women and men, that women had a single important job: raising children and keeping the home. Now, this was obviously a middle-class trope, since for the lower classes, women were expected to work in order to help their families survive. And for the wealthy, women were not cleaning their own houses or raising their own children. But this did not stop the cartoonists. One of their favorite subjects was to depict men in ragged clothes, or darning their own socks, while their mean suffragette wives went off to vote. There was a 1908 cartoon that showed suffragettes after they got the vote, sitting around a bar, smoking and playing cards, while their children gazed sadly at them from the other side of the bar. To me, that cartoon seems like more of an indictment of early 20th century fatherhood than of women, but I’m pretty modern and don’t expect my husband to spend all his time in bars.

The pro suffrage cartoons (and of course there were pro-suffrage cartoons, too!) tended to focus on the obviousness of letting citizens vote, regardless of their gender. I personally find them very beautiful; they appeal to our better natures, imploring men to give their mothers, wives, and daughters the rights that they previously held for themselves. One proclaimed “women bring ALL voters into the world; let women vote.” Another is a poem:

For the work of the day,

For the taxes we pay;

For the laws we obey —

We want something to say.

Another gently reminded men that women have influence in so many areas of life and therefore their voices and opinions are important. In the cartoon, Lady Liberty holds a list and has begun to write where a woman’s place “is”:

Women’s sphere is not the home, the law, industry, the school, the stage, business, the arts — it’s wherever she makes good.

The necessity, the incontrovertible moral justice of the cause for women’s suffrage, is obvious to us today. But then, as today, the march of progress went slowly and while the 19th amendment ended up bringing about a more perfect union in our country, it certainly didn’t create a fully perfect union, even after it ratified.

There are hidden histories within the suffrage movement: the fact is, the suffrage movement didn’t actually include all women.

There are hidden histories within the suffrage movement: the fact is, the suffrage movement didn’t actually include all women. After the Civil War, as the women’s rights movement narrowed to the vote particularly, there was a slow and steady exclusion of non-cis, non-white, non-Christian members and causes — by 1913 or so, it had funneled itself down to the whitest and most Christian ladies. This was mostly due to the fact that as women argued for their rights, men kept narrowing what it meant to be a respectable woman who “deserved” to vote. To fit into that box, women had to continually make themselves smaller and smaller to fit. Perhaps this mentality is familiar to women today; how often do we make ourselves the right “kind” of woman to fit into someone else’s idea of what we should be?

We’ve all seen Mary Poppins. The mom in that movie is a suffragette caricature-she’s white, wears white and a really pretty sash when she marches, and has money enough to hire someone responsible to manage her home in her stead. That image, more than any other, was also the image that the suffrage movement presented to the world once they caved to “respectability politics” to get the 19th amendment passed.

What did respectability politics mean then? It meant these ladies, in big hats and white dresses, marching in front of the White House and down 5th Avenue in New York City and on state capitol lawns. It was intentional and curated — Black women were asked to march at the end of parades, if they were even welcome at all. Women who were interested in suffrage *and* other rights were soundly ignored by the movement, if not actively chased off. The women who “deserved” the vote had to be as close to the white, middle class American ideal of womanhood as they could get if they wanted the men to listen to them. After ratification, the messaging stuck, and many of the women who worked without recognition to gain suffrage were erased entirely from the narrative, even though they played important roles in the organizing and lobbying work that went on before ratification.

I think it’s important to give you the stories of a few of these women who fought for the vote but were not able to wield it.

Mabel Ping-Hau Lee, born in China and raised in New York City, worked on the issue of women’s suffrage during her college years at Barnard and Columbia University. She wrote articles and marched for suffrage, trying to turn the tide both in the United States, and in China, where women also struggled under patriarchal systems that left them totally dependent on their families. When the vote was granted to women in the United States in 1920, Lee was still not able to vote. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, no Chinese person could ever become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Lee worked for suffrage while knowing this. Even so, she believed in the cause and did what she could to further it. Incidentally, the Exclusion Act was not repealed until during World War II, when the US became allied with China against Japan.

Lyda Newman was an African-American inventor who lived in the San Juan Hill neighborhood in New York City in the early 1900s. She founded the Negro Suffrage Headquarters in Manhattan in 1915 to canvas for suffrage issues and to organize her neighborhood. In order to hold her meetings, she closed down the street in front of her house during suffragette meetings to ensure that they could watch their own kids safely while they met about political issues. After ratification, she probably still could not vote in New York State — New York has one of the worst voter suppression histories in the nation, and as an African American it is likely that she was not allowed to vote. In 1870, the state rescinded their ratification of the 15th Amendment six months after they ratified; in 1908 they set voter registration days on Saturdays to discourage Jewish voters from registering, and in 1921 they barred non-English speakers from voting by instituting a required literacy test.

Adelina Otero-Warren was born in New Mexico and worked on the suffrage movement both in New York City and New Mexico. She is credited with almost single-handedly bringing New Mexico in to ratify the 19th amendment, and in 1922 was the first Latina to run for Congress. Already the Superintendent of Education for the city of Santa Fe, she gave speeches in both English and Spanish and advocated for equal educational opportunities for both Hispanic and Anglo children in her state. Because she was from a wealthy Hispanic family, she had no problem voting once it passed. Many New Mexicans, as part of the state’s constitution, were not eligible to vote at all because of their status as Native Americans.

Zitkala-Sa was born in the Dakota nation and worked for most of her adult life on both women’s issues and Native American issues. She supported suffrage, and later the Curtis Act of 1924 which sought to make Native people citizens of the United States. She ran voter drives, which she believed would help Native peoples to have a voice in the governments if the Act passed. But the Act, while granting citizenship, failed to give Native peoples living on reservations or on tribal land, the right to vote. As the 14th Amendment made women citizens without rights, so too did the Curtis Act make Native people citizens without rights. What has been interesting to me as I’ve researched suffrage is that the right to vote is not always sought. For instance, the Cherokee Nation was “given” the right to vote in 1946. When I first read that date, I thought it was so terrible that the government didn’t give the Nation the right to vote before then! Until I read the accounts by Cherokee authors. The Nation fought the right to vote right up until 1946 because by being granted suffrage by the US government, they were ceding their sovereignty as a foreign nation. In this case, suffrage was a weapon for a type of forced “equality”, a stripping-away of rights that Cherokee citizens wanted to protect. While this complicates my feelings about suffrage, it also helps me frame a more authentic and responsible understanding of voting rights and what they mean in our country.

What is suffrage? In Latin, it’s the vote given in favor of an election. In French, it is an intercessory prayer, a prayer to God on behalf of someone else who needs it. I really enjoy the French meaning, because it places a kind of mystery at the core of suffrage that elevates the American ideal of representative democracy: I am not only voting for myself, but on behalf of those around me who cannot do the same. The 19th amendment represents the slow drive forward of equality in America. As the 15th amendment enfranchised Black men, the 19th enfranchised all women. With one amendment, the United States doubled the voting population. As we saw, it was not perfectly successful. In fact, in the 1920 Presidential Election, the first year after universal suffrage was introduced, just 36% of eligible women turned out to vote (compared with 68% of men). The low turnout was partly due to the barriers to voting for non-white people, such as literacy tests, long residency requirements and poll taxes. Inexperience with voting and persistent beliefs that voting was inappropriate for women may also have kept turnout low, but there is no doubt that without *all* women being able to exercise their vote, turnout would remain low for female populations.

But the slow struggle for a more and more inclusive electorate continued, and has continued even to today as the last states include former felons in the electorate we work to combat voter disenfranchisement. The struggle will probably never truly end. The work for equality is and was truly a kind of crusade. While so many women never lived to see their struggles for suffrage bear fruit, and others lived only to see that their work did not create true equality, they helped to make our American union a little more perfect, and I do believe we continue that work today.