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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

The movement for woman suffrage, which began in 1846, was for a time overshadowed by the abolition movement. Virtually all women’s rights advocates supported abolition, but not all abolitionists supported woman suffrage. Numerous abolitionists believed it was inappropriate for women to engage in public political actions. Feeling that their servitude was more deplorable than the political, legal, and economic disabilities of the women of the United States, many women suffragists gave their time, energy, and money to the freeing of African Americans.

When the Civil War had ended, and the Fourteenth Amendment was under discussion, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other leaders learned with amazement and indignation that it was proposed to put the word “male” in the Constitution of the United States, which before that time had not discriminated against women. The suffragists immediately petitioned Congress. When the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was pending, the women had been encouraged by both Republicans and abolitionists to send petitions to Congress. They collected more than three hundred thousand names. Several Republican senators applauded the efforts of women everywhere and told them, “You are doing a noble work.” However, when the women petitioned for their own rights, they received little sympathy and much active opposition.

Republicans had declared that suffrage was a natural right belonging to every citizen who paid taxes and helped support the state and that the ballot was the only weapon by which one class could protect itself against the aggression of another. Despite this, the Republicans failed to help the women in favor of the abolitionist movement. Many abolitionists refused to sign the women’s petition, saying, “This is the African American’s hour.” African American men warned that “women must not block our chance, lumbering the Republican Party with woman suffrage.”

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

In 1911, actress, playwright, and “suffragette” Vida Sutton coined the term “suffragent.” A suffragent referred to a man who was big enough to see that women should be given the right to vote. “This type of man is one of the most powerful allies of the cause of women,” Vida explained to a reporter for the New York Times. “He not only does not hinder but does all that he can to help.”

From the time the woman suffrage movement was first launched in 1846, there were many prominent suffragents who played significant roles in helping women secure the right to vote.  At the urging of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, California senator Aaron Augustus Sargent introduced the first federal woman suffrage amendment in 1878. The amendment was reintroduced in every succeeding Congress until adopted in 1920. “I believe the time is rapidly coming when all men will conclude that it is no longer wise or judicious to exclude one half of the intelligence and more than one half of the virtue of the people from the ballot box,” Sargent remarked in April 1878.

San Francisco mayor Adolph Sutro echoed those sentiments in March 1896. “I believe equality is the basic principle of our government—hence women should assume all the responsibilities that arise out of her moral and mental endowments as a citizen,” Sutro told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Woman’s advent as a voter will be the means through which the government may be perpetuated, as embodying justice, equality, and righteousness.”

Frederick Douglass, American abolitionist, orator and lecturer, was present at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and advocated for women’s rights along with abolition and the rights of African Americans. At a meeting of the National Council of Women in 1895, he reminded an enthusiastic crowd of what he had written about the issue in 1848. “A discussion of the rights of animals would be regarded with far more complacency by many of what are called the wise and the good of our land than would be a discussion of the rights of women. . . . We hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for man.”

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No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

The watershed year of 1848, in the strife-filled period before the American Civil War, saw the rise of women at Seneca Falls who declared that they were equal to men and not just worthy of the vote—deserving of it by the divine right of being human and citizens. Of course, while that organized group was determined to fight for the equality of women, they were fighting at a time when the equality of all people was the central question of the day. The denial of rights to women and blacks (freed and slave) was incongruous with the enlightenment ideals of democracy and the hopes of a new republic—but those in charge of the new republic were having a tough time seeing past the blinders of their race and sex.

During and immediately after the Civil War, many abolitionists and suffragists worked together toward the common goal of ending slavery, and in 1866, after the end of the war, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association intending to continue the fight for voting and civil rights for all citizens.  That was when things got complicated.

As part of the process of reconstructing the Confederate states into the Union, Congress became absorbed in passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, amendments that defined both who qualified for citizenship regardless of race and sex and that drew criteria for who could vote in elections. The interpretation of the language in both amendments drew challenges from all sides—and ultimately split the previously strong movement in favor of suffrage for all former slaves and women into factions who were in favor of the political expedience of allowing males of African descent the right to vote regardless of their previous state of servitude while letting women’s interest be pushed to the side.

But the split was more complicated than that. In the late 1860s, a further division erupted between women’s suffrage advocates after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth were the law of the land. The faction led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony favored taking swift action to enact national woman suffrage through yet another constitutional amendment. The faction led by Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe—once staunch allies of Stanton and Anthony in the struggle for suffrage and the end to slavery—favored using the clause of the Fifteenth that gave the states the right to decide who could vote. They wanted to approach the woman suffrage issue one state at a time.

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No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

Among the busy men sitting at rows of welding machines at the Standifer-Clarkson Shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, in 1917, were several equally busy women. All were dressed in drab gray or brown clothing, work boots, heavy canvas aprons, and off-white, triangular scarves covered their heads. Sparks flew from the metal pieces being fused together to be used to build ships that would be dispatched to fight in the war in Europe. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in June 1914 propelled the major European military powers toward war. Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist, was responsible for Ferdinand’s death. His actions prompted Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia. European nations aligned themselves with the side of the argument they favored, and fighting ensued for more than three years before the United States entered the conflict. Germany’s atrocities during this time forced the United States to declare war on the country in April 1917. Hundreds of thousands of American men were enlisted to fight, leaving numerous vacancies in the workforce. Women were recruited to fill those positions. Some of those positions were in shipyards such as the Standifer-Clarkson Shipyard.

Despite the prevailing idea among traditionalists that women should stay out of the workforce, World War I made the need for labor so urgent that women were hired in record numbers. In addition to taking jobs in department stores, railroads, and with the postal department, women answered the call to be employed as police officers, firefighters, munitions workers. By the spring of 1918, munitions factories were the largest employer of American women.

When it came to serving their country, women proved they were equal to men. The employment of women supported the war. Women worked not only as nurses but also as ambulance drivers, in steel mills, and in the textile industry. Women across the nation were doing their part to help. Although some political leaders recognized their contributions and were grateful, they still were not convinced granting women the vote was right for the country.

By the time the United States had entered World War I, all the western states had achieved women’s suffrage at some level, but securing the right for women to vote in every state continued to be a struggle. The comments about that struggle by Lucy Burns, a leader of the NWP, were echoed by women everywhere. “It’s unthinkable that a national government which represents women should ignore the issue of the right of all women to be politically free,” Burns noted. Regardless of the battle being fought abroad, key suffragist leaders such as Harriot Stanton Blatch (daughter Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns believed women needed to continue to fight for their rights on the home front.

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No Place for a Woman

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No Place for a Woman:  The Fight for Suffrage in the Wild West.

From 1912 to 1920, the voting map shifted with astonishing rapidity after the long years of the late nineteenth century when progress had seemingly stalled. The political exigencies of the Civil War and Reconstruction had made way for the reforming zeal of progressives at the turn of the twentieth century, and while war in Europe was on the horizon, the Gilded Age and industrialization had swept across the nation, allowing citizens a chance to participate in clubs and political organizations at a new level. And the expansion of states into the West had opened new opportunities for the people to have a voice in shaping laws. By 1912, decades had passed since the voters of Wyoming Territory had allowed women not only to step to the ballot box but also to appear on those ballots. Women all over the country had joined civic organizations in record numbers—the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), pro-suffrage organizations, as well as anti-suffrage organizations. The direst of predictions about what having masculine responsibilities would do to women had not come to fruition. Instead there had been a great awakening about the potential and abilities of the half of the population that had been silenced for so long.

In the West, where women found greater acceptance in the professions and demonstrated their grit amid the hardships of the frontier, the vote had happened quickly in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps the looser constraints of a less regimented social structure had contributed to women participating in all sorts of activities outside of their traditionally proscribed sphere, including political campaigns. Women worked for the candidates of their choice, for social reforms including the prohibition of alcohol, and for the vote. Their campaigns covered scattered voters stretched over millions of square miles—but the personal approach advocated by suffragists in some of the western states had proved to be effective. Women were lobbying their neighbors and their legislators personally to make the case for equality. And the public arm of the suffrage movement had gained hard-earned acceptance in many places.

Across the Great Plains, particularly in the middle West, the WCTU had reached its long fingers into the more organized churches, schools, and town structures crying for the reform that the vote could bring. Kansas passed a suffrage amendment in 1912, even before its wilder neighbors to the west, propelled by the reform zeal of women like Carrie Nation. Illinois followed in 1913. South Dakota had been debating and rejecting suffrage since its territorial days, but it would grant the vote to women in 1918, a year after its sibling North Dakota offered presidential suffrage to the women of that state. Nebraska also took the presidential route, giving women the right to vote for the man who would hold that office in 1917. Many other states opted for that introduction to the franchise for women, offering the chance to vote in presidential elections before the national amendment would grant the unlimited right in 1920. Illinois, Missouri, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and other states east of the Mississippi were all beginning to push the door open in that way by 1919.

Part of the reason for the shift was that even before the Great War, women in the cities began entering the workforce in growing numbers, taking on jobs in numerous professional fields as well as continuing to work in the more traditionally feminine occupations. As a result, women’s economic status had undergone a significant transformation, and as skirt hems lifted, the arguments against the vote seemed to fall away. Politics—and the anti-progressive attitudes toward Prohibition and labor laws and social welfare programs—still stood in the way of equality, but the arguments against the vote became thinner and thinner.

To learn more about how women won the right to vote in the West read

No Place for a Woman