Journal Notes

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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On September 18, 1909, Laura Gregg of the Arizona Equal Suffrage Campaign Committee rolled a sheet of letterhead into her typewriter and began an affectionate letter to Anna Howard Shaw, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Shaw, who had been injured in an accident, was recuperating in Minneapolis, and Gregg wrote to her:

“If I had known that you were roasting on a bed of suffering in Minneapolis, I should certainly have sent you a little love note, as well as to send you all of the helpful thoughts that I could. At this late date, however, it is not too late to tell you how much I rejoice that your recovery has been so speedy, and that through it all you have had such Spartan courage to do such wonderful things as I am reading about, while you must have been suffering so much.”

Shaw, as head of the biggest national organization promoting woman suffrage, had been traveling the country stumping for the cause and speaking from her heart to the state organizations that had sprung up in nearly every state and territory. She had won the hearts of her fellow suffragists with her warm and intelligent rhetoric and open attitudes. And while she was working on the national stage, organizations like the Arizona Equal Suffrage Campaign Committee were going into homes, posing legal arguments, asking questions, and changing minds.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the territorial governments of the West formed and territorial laws were established, and then as territories made the move into statehood, suffrage advocates across the country had their eyes on the opportunities that came with crafting the law of the land from the ground up. If women hadn’t been excluded from the vote by law in each territory, went the reasoning, they didn’t need to be under the new laws and statutes that were being written.

After the Civil War, the discussion about women and the vote had been firmly on the political table for almost two decades. Women all over the United States had been protesting, lobbying, and had even been arrested for attempting to vote in elections. Pressure grew, as early as the 1870s, for a national suffrage amendment in Congress. But faced with great opposition—or apathy—on a nationwide scale, many suffrage advocates saw the laws being written on the frontier as the best chance for the vote to take hold in law.

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

No Place for a Woman

The Academy of Western Artists announced today that the book According to Kate: The Legendary Life of Big Nose Kate Elder, Love of Doc Holliday is the winner of the 2020 AWA Elmer Kelton Award for non-fiction.  Good for you, Kate!

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

On April 5, 1895, the lavish Grand Opera House in Salt Lake City was filled to overflowing with a host of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen. Women engaged in serious discussions outnumbered the men filtering into the building. Musicians in the orchestra pit serenaded the preoccupied crowd standing, talking, and preparing to sit upon rows of waiting chairs. As the clock approached two o’clock in the afternoon, more than a dozen women filtered on stage and took their places among the plush seats stationed in front of a magnificent, hand-painted drop curtain. Conversations quieted, and the room slowly came to order. When the music faded, Mrs. J. A. Froiseth called the meeting of suffragists in the Utah Territory to order. The following articles were read to the audience.

“Whereas, a convention is being held in this city for the purpose of framing a constitution for the proposed state of Utah, and; whereas, the question is being considered by said convention of incorporating in said constitution a provision for women suffrage, and; whereas, no opportunity has been afforded the women of this Territory to manifest their opinion upon the matter; and whereas, by the adoption of a plank of favor of woman suffrage in the platforms of both political parties, no opportunity was afforded to the citizens of this Territory to indicate their approval or disapproval of the proposition, and; whereas, it is conceded alike by the advocates and the opponents of woman suffrage that in all intellectual attributes and attainments the women are entitled to vote, and if this is true, then they possess the necessary intelligence and attainments to enable them to determine for themselves whether they desire this privilege, and they should be given the opportunity to decide this question for themselves.”

The crowd of onlookers cheered and applauded the articles read aloud. They waved their hands in the air approvingly and congratulated one another for their dedication to the cause. Someone shouted, “Give me suffrage or give me nothing.” That single voice then led many in a chant of “Give me suffrage or give me nothing!”

An enthusiastic supporter of the cause leapt to her feet and proclaimed, “The fight is still on!” Fellow believers praised the sentiment. “Ninety percent of the people hesitate to try the experiment these men would force upon us,” the spontaneous orator announced. “You who propose to vote against statehood make your voice heard now, with no uncertain sound. If we are to have equal suffrage, let us have it equal. Let the women serve on juries, let them work their poll tax on the roads, make them subject to military service, let them be drafted and enlisted in time of war, let them be equal in all things!”

More than twenty-five years prior to the enthusiastic gathering at the Grand Opera House where women argued for their right to vote, a somber group of leaders in the Utah Territorial Legislature quietly passed an act giving women that entitlement. Sarah Young, grandniece of settler and Mormon Church leader Brigham Young, became the first women to vote in the region. She voted in a municipal election on February 14, 1869.

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.

When suffragist Susan B. Anthony boarded the passenger car of the Union Pacific Railroad in Ogden, Utah, in late December 1871, the train was filled to capacity. Men, women, children, livestock, baggage, and crates containing food and supplies were being loaded onto the vehicle bound for Chicago. Weary and carrying an oversized satchel bulging with clothing, books, and papers, the fifty-one-year-old woman climbed aboard and began the slow procession past the throngs of people occupying various seats and berths. She snaked her way toward the semi-private compartments until she found the one she was to occupy for the duration of the trip. The pair Anthony would be traveling East with had already arrived and made themselves comfortable. She smiled at the congenial-looking couple as she entered. California congressman Aaron A. Sargent politely got to his feet to help her stow away her bag. He introduced himself, then introduced his accomplished wife, Ellen, to Anthony, who returned the kindness.

Not long after Anthony was settled, Ellen admitted to being familiar with her work. Anthony’s crusade to acquire the right to vote for women had been covered in the Sacramento newspapers as well as the publications in Nevada City, California, where the politician and his family lived. She had joined the fight for woman’s suffrage in 1852. Since that time, she had traveled from town to town, inspiring women to fight for equal rights. The crusade, which initially began in Seneca Falls in New York in 1840, had expanded westward. Once Wyoming granted women the privilege to cast their ballots, suffrage rose up in territories beyond the Mississippi to battle for the opportunity to do the same. Crusaders reasoned if women could gain that right state by state the federal government would be persuaded to pass an amendment making it law.

From June to December of 1871, Anthony had traveled more than thirteen thousand miles, delivered 108 lectures, and attended close to two hundred rallies on the issue of woman’s suffrage. There were others such as Emily Pitts Stevens, who helped form the California Woman Suffrage Association, and physician and minister Anna Howard Shaw who had joined the fight and were hosting meetings to inform and educate women about the movement. It was essential that the message of equality be heard in every mining community, fishing village, and major city from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Women needed to be encouraged to petition for enfranchisement. They needed to be reminded they were entitled to speak for themselves and stand against fathers and husbands voting for them. Anthony and the other dedicated suffragists had been able to share the message with women in Kansas, Wyoming, Utah, Washington, and Oregon; they had great hope the ladies in California would back reform.

Anthony couldn’t have found a more receptive audience for her message than Congressman Sargent and his wife. Ellen had founded the first suffrage group in Nevada City, California, in 1869, and Aaron was in full support of giving women the vote. The Sargents had moved to California from Massachusetts in 1849 and settled in Nevada City in 1850. In addition to owning and operating the newspaper the Nevada Daily Journal, Aaron was an attorney and former U. S. senator. Ellen was a homemaker and mother who was active in the Methodist Church. She firmly believed that women could not attain their highest development until they “had the same large opportunities and the same large chances as her brothers have.”

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.

Esther Hobart Morris carefully arranged borrowed chairs and warmed, borrowed teacups as she prepared for her visitors to arrive. Her tiny mountain cabin, perched at seventy-five hundred feet of elevation in the mountains at South Pass City, Wyoming Territory, was cleaned, decorated, and full of all of the delectable morsels she could contrive for the important guests who would be arriving soon. Her husband, Jim Morris, was barely tolerant of the bustle as he nursed a foot swollen with gout, but he didn’t make his objections audible. The couple had only been in South Pass City a few months, and the time had not been easy for him, though Esther had leapt into local life with her usual enthusiasm. Her son from her first marriage, Archibald Slack, was soon to arrive to report on the afternoon’s event for the newspaper. His story would appear in time for the elections that were to be held the next day in the boomtown of two thousand men, women, and children. White men would be voting to send delegates to Wyoming’s Territorial Convention.

Everything about the scene Esther set that day in her tiny home was right by her standards and the standards of the day. The room was cozily domestic, and any Victorian in 1869 would have felt at ease with the ritual that was about to take place. The pouring of tea by a proper wife and mother, the gathering of friends over small plates of sandwiches and desserts, removed gently from cherished china with delicate tongs, the feathers and frills worn by the women and the ridges from hats just removed remaining in the hair of the gentlemen were both comforting and comfortable. But the gentle talk of community events and shared acquaintance of an elegant tea would give way to the talk that was dominating South Pass City on that fall day—the territorial elections of the next day and the future of Wyoming Territory itself. And that was exactly what Esther Morris intended.

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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.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

July 9, 1848, Waterloo, New York. It was a hot Sunday afternoon, and Jane Hunt, wife to prominent Quaker Richard P. Hunt, was home tending her two-week-old daughter and awaiting the arrival of the guests she expected for afternoon tea. Hunt’s home, an elegant, federal-style mansion, was comfortable and well-appointed, though not overtly luxurious, as befit her Quaker faith. It was the perfect venue for a meeting between a group of local Quaker women and renowned speaker, minister, and champion of reform Lucretia Mott, who was in the area visiting from Philadelphia. Mott, a Quaker minister, had been speaking openly in public and advocating fiercely for the abolition of slavery since the 1830s.

Hunt likely looked forward to the tea party and to the lively discussion she expected with Mott; her friend and fellow Quaker Mary Ann McClintock; Mott’s sister, Martha Wright; and an acquaintance of Mott’s named Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Mary Ann McClintock was the wife of the local Quaker minister—both she and he were adherents to a branch of Quakerism called Hicksites, which promoted equality between the sexes. Martha Wright was well known for her intellect, her witty commentary, and for her support of her sister’s work and beliefs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had first met Mott when the two were excluded from participation in the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London on the basis of their sex, was also in attendance as she was visiting from nearby Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton took the opportunity, while the women enjoyed tea and dainty treats in Hunt’s spacious and comfortable parlor, to unleash “a torrent of [her] long-accumulating discontent,” over the inequality of the sexes.

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

No Place for a Woman