The cause of women’s suffrage changed the course of American history, it is the reason that women are allowed to vote in the United States today. The right to vote was not easily won for women. In fact, many women who had campaigned for blacks to receive the vote in the United States were left along the wayside when Congress voted to allow black men to vote but still forbade women the right to suffrage. The suffrage movement was a decade’s long battle and a tenacious often unpopular political movement that permanently altered the social and political landscape of American politics. Even after women received the right to vote in the United States, the study of the movement was largely ignored by mainstream scholars and the biographies of people like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were relegated to the few who studied women’s history. Of note, suffrage for women was granted grudgingly with the votes to pass the law succeeding in most cases by a margin of one vote. In the United States, the suffrage movement is consonant with the biographies of several formidable women who furthered the cause. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are usually the foremost agents for change that historians analyze in the period. The results of research on Susan B. Anthony lead to There exists a large quantity of women’s history books that detail rights for women and suffrage specifically. In Concise History of Woman Suffrage, several professors have compiled a vast amount of primarily sources including speeches and commentary on Susan B. Anthony and others who were active in the women’s rights movements in the United States (Bulhe 97). These women faced many personal attacks; because women’s suffrage meant feminism to many critics, suffrage therefore stood “for careers and more generally for objective female achievement,’” which was considered was a “psychic disorder” among these females (Buhle 175). Coupled with the above-mentioned book is one that highlights the two women most active in the suffrage movement. In Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony there is an abundance of primary sources, some of them indicate the great personal sacrifice that individual women had to make to promote the suffrage cause. Letters and diaries offer insight and help humanize the people who not only attracted great public attention to their cause, but likewise who were scorned and publically ridiculed because of their beliefs and efforts (Gordon 149). Many women who were dedicated to women’s suffrage movement did not have families of their own and likewise did not have an extended family that supported their cause. This was a plus and a minus. Obviously is would have been more bearable if some of these lonely women had husbands and children to comfort and support them as they faced massive derision and even retaliation because of their work. However, they were also consoled in some cases, by others. One woman wrote in defense of Susan B. Anthony, she “is all that is best and noblest in woman. She is ideal, and if we will have in women who vote what we have in her, let us all help to promote the cause of woman suffrage” (Gordon 37). So presumably, the suffragists took comfort where they could find it. One of the problems of the suffragists still plagues females today, it is considered unfeminine to get mad at others; therefore, women turned their anger against themselves and it becomes depression. Noted in one of the diaries was this sentiment, “You can write and say your say in many ways, and at other times than in suffrage conventions. Feelings of discontent, anger, and revenge have a worse effect on ourselves than others” (Gordon 197). Thus, the plus side for not being in the role of wife and mother was that they could devote more time and travel more easily in the work of their cause. Anthony, for example, was known as a diligent crusader who courageously challenged the government, the legal system, and even police. However, behind the picket lines, assemblies, protests, and public arrests there was a real woman determined to change the course of American history.
She stands out among many of the suffragists and Susan B. Anthony is continuing to shape women’s history in America not only because of her battle for women’s rights but also because she may have been a lesbian. Anthony’s struggles, hardships, and demonstrations have traditionally long viewed in American history as those of a spinster who devoted her life to bettering women’s lives and to suffrage. She is one of the women who are customarily Anthony revered by students of feminist studies. From recent perspectives, there may have been more to Anthony’s personal struggle than was previously known or discussed. Anthony was unique among many of the leading suffragettes because she used civil disobedience as a tool in her mission to change the course of American history. Lately, however, scholars have looked more closely at Susan B. Anthony as a person. Previously, the pervasive view of Anthony and of unmarried women in the 1800s, many of whom were teachers, was that they were sexually repressed, discreet women. More harsh evaluations were that Anthony was a dried up old spinster, who no man wanted to marry and so she became a teacher and suffragette because she was bitter and frustrated. The idea that Anthony had evolved into an unnatural type of female because she was precluded from performing the functions nature intended, specifically wife and mother, meant that she was peculiar. Cruel cartoonists and others portrayed Anthony as an eccentric, unfulfilled, and acrimonious old crone wearing a perpetual scowl and ugly black dress. The fact that Anthony often did favor all black and severe hairstyles only added to the image (Hollihan 123). Politically and socially, the suffrage movement had a peripheral impact on the lives of women in the United States during the 1800s. However, overall the really for women was that “Victorian ideals still reigned” (Hollihan 65). Some girls attended public school but it was not the norm for most. Those girls that did go to public schools largely were considered finished with their formal education by the age of 10-years old. College was highly unusual. Girls and women did not participate in competitive sports and even if they needed to earn money for their families they were still admonished to keep their complexions pale, “ladies kept their hats and gloves on to keep the sun from their faces and hands, and they practiced good posture, held up in part by corsets lined with steel rods” (Hollihan 65). Working women, working young girls, and female servants and female factory workers alike all were forced into this constricting mode of dress and behavior standards (Hollihan 65).
Another characteristic of Anthony that is fascinating and may explain why so many of her generation labeled her an unfulfilled spinster is the contention by contemporary scholars that she was in fact gay. This would have accounted for her lobe wolf status. It could also be the reason she presents such a dual study, die-hard crusader on one hand and private lonely woman on the other hand. As a lesbian in the 1800s, she would not have been accepted. However, these dual characteristics of Anthony give the LGBT community a heroine to look up to and an inspiration to continue their movement for equality in the face of personal hardship and potentially be ostracized. It is challenging to try to document a private woman’s’ sexual inclinations a couple of hundred years after the fact. Especially when that person was not publically homosexual. During Anthony’s lifetime, there were some well-known cosmopolitan male homosexuals who made their presence felt, but it was basically unheard of that a quiet Quaker and teacher would come out as gay. In her study, historian Lillian Faderman went into painstaking detail, dissecting every aspect of Anthony’s extant correspondence. Some of the letters and diary entries could be interpreted as overtures to women as friends and possibly as lovers. Anthony corresponded with a wide variety single women and married women. At times she mentions that she considered a least some of these women her lovers (Faderman 99).
In early America, in order to qualify to vote the restrictions were so great that there were very few voters at all and no female voters. The credentials needed to cast a ballot changed periodically and were the subject of much debate, mostly among white males. In general, the privilege of voting was reserved for rich white men over 21 years of age and sometimes meant belonging to a certain religion. The thinking behind these restrictions was that in order to vote a man should be correctly educated and should have enough wealth to give him a standing in the community. Men of standing and education were assumed to be the men who would make the best decisions. It seemed obvious to the wealthy men in early America, that there was no point in giving uneducated poor people the right to vote because they would not know how to corrected act or correctly use that power. Additionally, women and slaves certainly should not have a say in how the affairs of rich white men were conducted. Changes in voting laws, and the change to give women the right to vote, took place slowly. Eventually all the many restrictions were lifted and the voting age was lowered to 18 years old. All that remains in place of the old rules is that people must be United States citizens in order to vote in elections.
Interestingly, in the United States some white women voted in 1776 in a New Jersey election under a state clause that allowed all free peoples who owned property the right to vote. That voting continued until 1807 when the state of New Jersey closed what they came to view as a legal ambiguity mistakenly allowing women suffrage. By 1848, women’s rights organizers had arranged the Seneca Falls Women's Rights Convention at which they drew up a statement based on the Declaration of Independence. At that time, many considered the organizers who advocated for women’s suffrage to be radicals. Because women had to fight for the movement not only in the political arena but also on the home front, it was slow going. Much of what women were attempted to gain control over at first were rights to their own inherited property and control over their children in cases of divorce. The right to vote seemed abstract to many women who were on the brink of losing their children and had no control over their real estate once they married. While many white women were part of the abolitionist movement and campaigned for blacks to have the right to vote, sentiments were not reciprocal. For many years, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony set aside their drive for women’s suffrage to do war work for the Union. They joined hands with abolitionists who, despite the war, still had to press for President Lincoln to declare emancipation and end slavery once and for all” (Hollihan 23). African American men as well as white men who campaigned for the black vote were intent on getting the vote only for black men, not for women too no matter what their race. Women’s’ rights across the board, regardless of race were regarded as unimportant and possibly unnatural. This disconnect caused a split inside the suffrage coalition itself, and by 1867, major players in the movement including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton no longer supported the Reconstruction amendments because those amendments were intended to help males only. The movement for women’s suffrage grew out of the larger movements in favor of social justice, against slavery and child labor, and advocating for temperance. Women joined these reforms movements and they acted as a catalyst for women like Susan B. Anthony who had been abolitionists and then later dedicated to the cause of women’s rights. Thus, the historical content of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States is the overall era of activists, mostly by Protestants, who wanted to right the wrongs they saw in United States society. As far as understanding how suffrage for women was a turning point in United States history, the movement was more subtle and the changes were more gradual than other movements with clear-cut parameters. In the early 1900s, there were several states that had already granted women the right to vote in all elections: Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. In other states, women were allowed to vote in lower level elections and to participate in elections for school board members. In 1878, organizers managed to get women's suffrage before the Congress as a potential amendment, but lost. By the beginning of the 1900s, women were staging a variety of protests, including showing up at polls and attempting to vote. As mentioned, the suffrage movement was a logical offshoot of Progressive movements that marked the period between 1890 and 1920. As women joined the abolition movement in large numbers and participated, often through their churches, in the cultural, and political transformation of United States society they gained political experience. It was natural as women rallied for the rights of others that they began to inspect their own position in society. Temperance organizations were widespread and dominated by a huge number of female lay supporters as well as male clergy. Becoming experienced in advocating for temperance and for abolition as well as other social reforms exposed women to political techniques such as rallies, parades, speech making, and legal petitions. They in turn used these same techniques to campaign for women’s suffrage. By 1917 women had managed to rally enough support in other states to get them to pass laws allowing them to vote, however universal suffrage for all women still did not extend to the United States Constitution. There were however, groups of women who organized against women’s suffrage, these groups called themselves the Antis meaning they were anti-suffrage for women. The Antis “stood strong against the idea, and they organized committees in Eastern cities, though their efforts did not catch on with women who lived west of Ohio” (Hollihan 100). It appears that the Antis were mostly made up of women from privileged backgrounds who were satisfied with their station in life. It could have been that they felt threatened or pressured by the notion that women should or could be expected to control spheres outside of the home. The lives of women in the United States did not change dramatically with the passage of suffrage. As mentioned, the measures passed by extremely narrow margins and that alone shows how unpopular the idea that women should vote in elections was in the 1920s. There was not a miraculous epiphany on the part of the men who against women voting. They still made things difficult and women waged constant legal battles to gain control over their lives and their property. Many poor women remained poor and disenfranchised. On a positive level, suffrage allowed women who had previously been marginalized or outright excluded from higher education to attend college. Eventually this evolved into the opportunity to achieve higher degrees and entered professions from which they had previously been barred. Women did not achieve an equal footing at colleges nor were they readily accepted into the ranks of all-male fields. However, a few women did dare to attempt degrees in medicine, law, and the like. Women's suffrage did not immediately open these avenues to women; however, it did allow women to work toward securing positions of standing in society. Being allowed to enter professions and having more control over their personal property increased the economic role of women in America. Because of new educational opportunities, women were in a better position to understand their legal claims and rights.
Worse than those who openly opposed women’s suffrage were those that did not see it as an issue one way or the other, many people thought it was an atypical minority movement and others simply did not care. Giving women the right to vote began to slowly, it was a process that was adapted in a variety of locations early on in United States history. The territorial legislature of Wyoming granted women the vote in 1869; it was the first perpetual suffrage law in American history. By the 1890s, several states had granted suffrage. When by 1913 there were 12 states, the National Woman's Party, led by Alice Paul, decided to harness the voting power of women in those states to push a suffrage resolution through Congress. The country's involvement in World War I required the support of women; this provided the suffragists their decisive firepower. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, a woman suffrage amendment was submitted in the House of Representatives. By 1919, it had passed both houses of Congress and was soon ratified by the necessary 36 states. Finally, the women of America achieved justice when the 19th Amendment, also called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, became law in August 1920. The Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, "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 sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation The result of allowing women to vote could have been expected to change politics drastically because of the assumption that women would make different voting choices than men. At the federal level, there was not in fact an overwhelming change in the profile of the House or Senate. At the state level, other matters were being defined and debated besides the equality and configuration of government. Revenues and spending remained relatively unchanged however; there was a somewhat big shift in divorce legislations, custody laws, and prohibition. The best estimate of the way in which women voting influenced the political landscape of the United States was right to support a broader government role in family law (Lott 1165).
The fact of women in America agitating for the right to vote since the country started has changed the politics of the nation dramatically. Whether they were ignored, rebuked, or conceded to, there were always women demanding suffrage in either the forefront or background of American politics. Additionally, the difference in the way women vote changes as time passes however, overall since women began voting there has been a steady escalation of government spending. Many attribute the increase in what are commonly referred to as liberal welfare programs at the federal and state level to female voters. Because women’s suffrage overlapped fluctuations in attitudes toward prohibition, many believe that the law against alcohol would not have passed without pressure from women voters (Lott 1167). Additionally, more liberal and flexible divorce laws are attributed to the fact that women got the vote.
Works Cited
Buhle, Paul, Mari J. Buhle, and Elizabeth C. Stanton. The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from the Classic Work of Stanton, Anthony, Gage, and Harper. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Print.
Faderman, Lillian. To Believe in Women: What Lesbians Have Done for America-A History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Print.Gordon, Ann, Stanton, Elizabeth C, and Susan B. Anthony. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Vol. 5. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Print. History.Org. “How Has Voting Changed?” The Colonial Williamsburg Fund, Williamsburg, Virginia 23187. http://www.history.org/history/teaching/enewsletter/volume11/oct12/teachstrategy.cfm
Hollihan, Kerrie L. Rightfully Ours: How Women Won the Vote: 21 Activities. Chicago, Ill: Chicago Review Press, 2012. Print.
Lott, John R. How Dramatically Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government. Chicago: Law School, University of Chicago, 1998. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~iversen/PDFfiles/LottKenny.pdf
