USA > Connecticut > New London County > New London > Fiftieth Anniversary celebration publication, Connecticut College, 1911-1961 > Part 6
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fragists who helped forge the last links were not born when it began. Old suffragists who forged the first links were dead when it ended."1
I wonder how many of us can visualize the work involved in that simple recital. Some of you may have tried to help amend state consti- tutions and know what is involved there. Yet you are voting citizens, who are listened to with respect by the men you helped put into office and who will need your votes again. Multiply that work by 480 and add the enormous difference in prestige and power between voters and non-voters and you get some idea of one item on the list. Have you ever conducted or taken part in a referendum campaign? There were 56 of them. In New York State the women were in con- tinuous campaign from 1909 to 1917. It took six years to get an amendment submitted to the voters and it was defeated. When they were sure, near midnight on election night, a band of workers went to Times Square where they met the late crowds and standing on benches announced the start of the next campaign. In the morning they had a meeting and pledged a hundred thousand dollars. It took all that and a lot more.
The Amendment was repassed in the Legislature and was to be voted on in the fall of 1917. By that time we were in World War I and New York suffragists, like everybody else, were deeply engaged - in war work. But they remembered 1865 and did suffrage work too. They distributed ten million leaflets, enrolled ten thousand watchers at the polls and got the signatures of one million and thirty thousand women asking that they be granted the vote, to say nothing of the ceaseless stream of meetings, parades, publicity stunts and the tre- mendous organization in every Assembly district that made it all possible.
But I'm getting ahead of my story. The New York election (in 1917) was a day of triumph, the beginning of the end, but it did not come until forty-nine years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment had shattered those early hopes. One ray of brightness shone in the gloom of those days. The Territory of Wyoming, in 1869, while the debate on the negro amendments was most bitter, gave its women the vote. It asked admission as a state in 1890 but there was word that Congress would not accept voting women. The Wyoming Legislature wired back that they would stay out a hundred years rather than come in without their women, so Congress yielded. The Territory of Utah gave women the vote in 1870, but Congress took it away again in 1896. There were party splits in Colorado in
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1893 and in Idaho in 1896 as a result of which women got the vote there. All these were Western states, sparsely settled, where women had a scarcity value beyond that which they enjoyed in older and more thickly settled communities.
But these four victories were all from the end of the Civil War to 1910, in spite of ceaseless agitation, in spite of the obvious justice of the women's appeal, in spite of the great improvement in the status of women in other ways, and in a country founded on the principle that "Taxation without representation is tyranny." Why? The answer is twofold, not merely the difficulty of changing public opin- ion. We tend to forget that we are a Federation as well as a Nation. The qualifications of voters are fixed by the state constitutions with the exception of presidential suffrage for women, and can only be changed by amendment. Such an amendment must be approved by a two-thirds majority of both houses of the legislature in most states. In some states, the approval by two successive legislatures is necessary and then must be submitted to popular vote. In Illinois, for instance, before 1950, only one amendment could be passed at any one session, which meant that one had all the other reformers to fight as well as the forces of reaction. The proposal had to receive a majority, not of the votes cast on the measure, but of the votes cast at the election. This is a very great handicap as the vote for candidates is naturally far higher than the vote for measures. Most legislatures meet only once in two years, some only once in four. The different complica- tions are very great and many state constitutions are, for all practical purposes, unamendable.
An amendment to the Federal Constitution requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress and must then be ratified by either the legislatures or special conventions of three-fourths of the states. This seemed the easier way, but as long as women voted only in a few negligible western states, Congress would not take them seriously. The Senate appointed its own Woman Suffrage Committee in 1882, but during the thirty-five years of Republican control, the chairman was a Democrat from the deep South, where resentment against negro suffrage made them implacable enemies of further extensions of the suffrage, especially by federal action. One such . chairman said, "No man alive can answer the arguments of those women, but I would rather see my wife in her coffin than voting and I will die rather than let the Amendment be submitted."2
In the last years of the movement there was much controversy
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within the suffrage ranks over federal versus state work, but the Na- tional-American Woman Suffrage Association consistently stuck to the only logical course, introducing the Amendment in every session of Congress beginning in 1878, thus keeping it in the eyes of the nation and at the same time trying to get enough suffrage states to compel Congress to act.
The battle was incredibly discouraging. The Republican party, after making the women stand aside for the negro, should have come to their aid, but it rarely did and the only victories won in over forty years were due to party splits, with new groups bidding for support. Indifference the women could understand, but they also found, and after bitter experience learned to identify, a far more serious oppo- sition-that of the liquor interests, who considered woman suffrage as dangerous as the Temperance movement. As long as this opposi- tion was direct it was understandable and could be met, but it took far subtler forms-so called business men's associations, highly organized groups of brewers, distillers and "allied interests" with un- limited money. The manager of one of these groups in 1918 reported to his chiefs that the "allied interests" in Ohio had paid out a million dollars in five years to perfect an organization which per- formed with "unerring accuracy."
In the early days there were no corrupt practices acts, and Chinese in California, Russians in Dakota, Indians in Oklahoma and floaters everywhere, most of them ignorant and often illiterate, were marched to the polls and often paid off in sight of the women watchers. Mysterious things happened. In Iowa, where an amendment needed approval by two successive legislatures, engrossing clerks "lost the bill," or the Secretary of State "forgot" to give notice in time for submission to the second session. He apologized profusely-"the fault of a clerk"-but all that work had to be done again.
Towards the end of the fight Ohio women got presidential suffrage in 1916 by action of their legislature. The "unerring accuracy" group introduced into that session an amendment for full suffrage. The women fought it realizing that they needed to concentrate on work for the Federal Amendment. Then their opponents got out a peti- tion for a referendum to take presidential suffrage away, thus show- ing what their sudden conversion to suffrage by the amendment route really meant. This petition was circulated by saloon keepers mostly and the frauds were obviously great. The women asked for hearings before the election commissioners of every county in the
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state. They got them in four, and found that out of nearly ten thou- sand names on the list, eight and a half thousand were fraudulent. They were refused hearings everywhere else, the election was held and presidential suffrage taken away in 1917. In that election the "unerring accuracy" group concentrated on an amendment provid- ing for a referendum on the ratification of Federal Amendments and carried it by 193,000. Then the dry legislature voted presidential suffrage for women again. In 1919 the Federal Suffrage Amendment passed Congress and that fall the wets circulated two initiative peti- tions: one to reconsider the ratification of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, the other to take presidential suffrage away again, but carefully did not get them in on time. That meant that they would come to a vote in 1920 and it was hoped in this way to prevent the promulgation of the Federal Suffrage Amendment, in case it was ratified in time, and thus keep women from voting in 1920. I am sure it has been as hard for you to follow this as it was for me to boil the story down to its essentials. There was a lot more. Can you imagine what it meant to campaign against an enemy so wily, so devious, so full of expedients and with the power of vast wealth? The brewers' agents reported that four and a half millions had been raised for one campaign in Texas and "they hoped it would be enough."
To go back to our history. Things looked so black in 1910 that even Dr. Anna Howard Shaw3 felt the end would not come in her lifetime, but she kept on working just the same. Then, suddenly, victories: the State of Washington in 1910, California in 1911, the Progressive party with its suffrage plank, three states in the fall of 1912. In the parade at the Wilson Inaugural in 1913, Washington rowdies hustled the women, spat on them, knocked some of them down. The country was outraged and the movement won friends, in Congress and out.
That same year saw a new kind of victory, one which I believe really broke the deadlock between the almost unamendable state constitutions and a Congress that would not listen without many more suffrage states: Presidential Suffrage for women in Illinois. Lucy Stone, one of the great pioneers, had pointed out many years before that the Federal Constitution gave to the state legislatures the right to say who could vote for Federal electors, in other words for President. No state legislature in those days would consider giv- ing women a vote in that way. But a lucky political situation in
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Illinois in 1913 gave the Progressives the balance of power, and their leader, Medill McCormick, firmly believed in woman suffrage. The women in charge of the campaign had a real sense of political strategy. They were almost the first to apply the card-catalogue method of lobbying. During the long weeks of deadlock while the legislature was trying to get itself organized, the women found out all there was to know about every man. They classified them, hope- ful, possible, hopeless, and let the hopeless severely alone, so that their enemies would not know what was happening. No vague ex- pressions of good will fooled them. No man was listed as for the bill unless he had definitely promised to vote for it, and not even then, if his reputation for changeability was bad. If he said the women in his district didn't want suffrage, the state president called up key women there and they descended upon him and got him to see the light. One by one the cards shifted to the friendly side and the time came to press for a vote. It was going to be very close, and the story goes that when the State House elevator slipped its brakes and started plunging down, one of the suffragists, recognizing a friend as he whirled past her called out in anguish, "Oh, there goes a vote!" Luckily there were no physical casualties, though the man in ques- tion was so teased by his friends that he switched to the other side. When the bill got on to the floor, the opposition, realizing that they were losing, tried the usual tactics of delay and amendment. One such sounded very plausible and the outcome was uncertain until McCormick leaped upon his seat and in stentorian tones called out, "A vote for that amendment is a vote against the suffrage bill." To the fury of the opposition the move was stopped and the bill passed soon after.
The political effect of this victory was enormous. True, it gave women the right to vote only for President and certain local offices that had been created since the adoption of the State Constitution. But politically, the presidential vote was so important that women now had to be reckoned with quite as much as men, wherever they held it. The other suffrage states were western and agricultural, but here was a state east of the Mississippi, with the second largest city in the country, and a big industrial state as well. If suffrage would work in Illinois, it would work anywhere, and the Illinois women set about the business of making good on their new responsibilities with great seriousness and considerable success.
In this connection I am reminded of my Italian cook, who wanted
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to know what all the excitement was about. When I told her, she said, "I am now the equal of my husband?" I said, "Yes," whereat she vanished and reappeared the next morning with a very black eye but still triumphant.
The card-catalogue method was now applied to Congress and the suffrage measure brought to a vote there in December 1915, but without success. So the women turned again to the states and had a bad two years with splits in their own ranks over strategy and disap- pointment that the day of victory, which had seemed so near, was once more delayed. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, a gallant and witty personality and one of the greatest orators this country has known, retired that year and was succeeded by Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, to whose statesmanship and organizing genius the final victory is due.
1916 was a presidential election year and the parties were about to meet in their national conventions. Mrs. Catt decided the time was ripe for demonstrations. She planned a parade of women to take the suffrage plank to the Republican Convention in Chicago. The day for the parade dawned and with it came the worst cloudburst Chicago had ever seen. But to the everlasting glory of their sex, nearly 8,000 women marched the long distance from the Loop to the Coliseum. Some of them were over eighty years old but no one got pneumonia-a good cause is very warming. The Resolutions Com- mittee was in session on the stage built up on the floor of the Colise- um and, as the last marcher entered, the president of the Antis con- cluded her peroration: "In the name of the women of America, gentlemen, we beg of you, do not force this burden upon them, they do not want it." She turned to face a hall full of dripping women, their colored scarves running over their uniforms and their straw hat brims hanging in ruffles about their faces, looking grim denial of that statement. They had faced pneumonia and cheerfully made guys of themselves to show just how much they did want it. The contrast was impressive. We got our plank and the Democrats fol- lowed a week later in St. Louis with another, favoring suffrage "by state action." It was there that Mrs. Catt's famous "Golden Lane" of women with yellow parasols lined the street leading to the Demo- cratic convention.
Armed with this party backing the campaigns for presidential suf- frage went well. Some southern states gave women the right to vote in the primaries, which, since they were one party states, was the
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political equivalent of full suffrage. Then in 1917 came the great New York victory and the time for the final attack on Congress had arrived.
A two-thirds majority is a very difficult thing to get. The card-cata- logue showed that we had the votes in the House, but by the narrow- est margin. All the men on whom we counted were there when the vote was taken, though their loyalty was severely tested. One man was brought in on a stretcher from a Washington hospital to be present when the vote came. Another had had his shoulder broken in an accident, but stayed in the House walking up and down the hall in great pain, so as to be there when needed. There were heroes as well as heroines in the suffrage fight.
The Amendment passed the House and on the same day (January 10, 1918) English women got their full suffrage from what had been considered the most conservative parliamentary body in the world, the House of Lords. That distinction then passed to the United States Senate where the fight now was. The Prohibition Amendment had already carried and it was hard to understand the delay on the woman's measure. The poll showed two votes short and appeals were made to President Wilson to do what he could with the Democrats and to the Republican leaders as well. They tried their best but the Amendment lost. Then the suffragists decided that, since they could not change the votes, they had better change the men, and at the fall elections they succeeded in defeating two of their most bitter enemies.
The new Congress was Republican, so the Democrats, unwilling to let the credit of enfranchising the women go to their opponents, brought the Amendment up again in the Lame Duck session that still remained to them. The form had been slightly changed to make this possible. Two of the friends of suffrage in Congress had died and their places had been filled by men hostile to it. There were other shifts, but the Amendment finally lost by one vote. By this time twenty-six other countries had enfranchised their women and the delay was very hard to bear. Congress was not due to meet until December, but President Wilson called a special session in May 1919, and among other things earnestly urged the passage of the suffrage amendment. It went through the House in record time and on June 4th the Senate capitulated.
Then came ratification. You remember that most state legislatures meet once in two years, some only once in four. It was now so late in
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the season that most legislatures were at the point of adjournment, some had adjourned. Lightning swift work was needed. The suffrage army mobilized and got eleven ratifications inside of a month. Then it became necessary to call twenty-two special legislative sessions if women were to vote in 1920. There were heart-breaking delays in getting them and expensive legal fights over the constitutionality of the Amendment, over the right of states to have referendum votes on ratification, a mass of confusing, bewildering technicalities, the neg- lect of any one of which might have undone the vast work of seventy- two years. Slowly, agonizingly, state by state ratified until only one was lacking. The women hoped for special sessions in Connecticut or New Hampshire, where the polls showed a favorable majority, but the governors refused to call them.
Then suddenly, (in 1920), there seemed a chance in Tennessee and Mrs. Catt went down to see about it. She stayed through two weary months of the hardest and most bitter kind of political fighting. I suppose no one who was not there can really imagine how bitter or how hard. Her mail was opened, her telephone wires were tapped, she was hissed and booed by rowdies in the hotel lobbies. Every kind of pressure was put on the men who supported the Amendment to make them change. A law had been put through the legislature in preparation for this moment, providing that an Amendment to the Federal Constitution could only be ratified by a legislature elected after the Amendment had been passed by Congress. This was now invoked to get from the presidential candidates hedging letters practically withdrawing their support. The law was uncon- stitutional, and the issue had been fought out with the governor before he consented to call the special session. However, the con- fusion caused by this apparent repudiation of the Amendment by the two party heads was very great and the opposition made the most of it. When the vote was finally taken the women's poll showed just enough to carry. What was their horror to learn that one of their friends had been called home by a wire telling of his baby's dan- gerous illness and had gone to the station. They followed him, found that he would have a long wait at a junction, arranged for a special train to get him there in time for his connection. He came back and voted and the Amendment passed. (The baby got well.)
Mrs. Catt could not rest even then. One of the opposition, when he saw that it would carry, voted for the Amendment so that he could later move to reconsider. Next morning the friends of suffrage
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arrived to find that during the night the opponents had fled across the border to Alabama. They stayed there until enough of the friends of suffrage, weary of waiting, had gone home, to give an anti-suffrage majority. Then they returned to vote the Amendment down. The procedure was not really legal but there was just enough uncertainty about it to make the situation dangerous. Actually, Tennessee's proud claim to have been the state that put over the Federal Suffrage Amendment was upheld. But until that decision could be made final, it seemed vital to get more ratifications to be surely safe. So the weary suffrage leaders went back to Connecticut and New Hamp- shire, where the governors were at last persuaded to call the special sessions they had so long refused, and the long fight was won.
What kept the women at it all those years, what gave them the courage to rise again after defeat after defeat? The Antis used to tell us it was so silly to fight for suffrage, that any woman of importance and standing could get what she wanted from men without the bother of voting. That argument turned thousands of indifferent women into fighting suffragists. We fought for the poor and the weak, for those who could not help themselves, for children, for those neglected aspects of government about which women know more than men, and the vote was a tool we had to have to get that work done: The use that this and future generations make of it is their affair, the tool is laid in their hands. But it was dearly bought. When I think of those seventy-two years of ceaseless toil-the cour- age, the resourceful skill, the long slogging persistence-and re- member that in spite of abuse and betrayal not one act of violence was committed by American women in order to make democracy. complete-my blood thrills to have had even a small part at the end of so honorable a page of human history.
I have reminded you that the suffragists never resorted to violence to win their crusade. But what of the men-who, however slowly or reluctantly, gave them the victory? There have been very few in- stances in history where half the adult population of a great country, in a position of almost complete political and personal power, de- liberately surrendered it in obedience to a principle (taxation with- out representation is tyranny) without having had any force to com- pel them. I am reminded that they not only had the principle but also the governmental machinery to make their action effective. This certainly helped-though it does not lessen the debt we owe them.
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What were they like, the women who inspired this revolution and made it happen? Four names stand out in the beginning, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. All were abolitionists, all fought for Temperance, all knew at first hand the bitter injustice of the position of women.
Lucretia Mott, grandmother of Anna Lord Strauss,4 was a Quaker minister, gifted, logical, eloquent. Quakers gave women equality with men in the affairs of the Meeting and in speaking, though they were not so wildly radical as to pay them equal wages. This rankled with Lucretia and together with the London Anti-Slavery Conven- tion made her a suffragist. Gentle, soft-spoken, she was adamant on questions of principle, had limitless courage. When the mob, after burning Independence Hall, started out to tar and feather the Motts, a friend, starting ahead to warn them, found them sitting calmly in their home, unmoved as the noise drew nearer. Luckily another friend, more quick-witted, put himself at the head of the rabble and, hurling anathemas at the Motts, drew it off by another road.
Lucy Stone, a farmer's daughter, was outraged very early at the treatment of women by their husbands and the laws, and determined that when she got older she would change them. Then reading in her Bible she came across the text-"Thy husband shall rule over thee." Was God against women too? Her mother told her it was the curse of Eve and she must submit, but she decided to learn Greek and find out if the Lord's word had been correctly translated.
Her father thought learning for women was foolishness but he loaned her the money, at interest, to finish school so that she could teach. She started at the magnificent rate of a dollar a week and board, finally raised to sixteen dollars a month-"good pay for a woman." It took her nine years to save enough money to go to college -Oberlin-the first to admit women. She eked out her expenses by teaching, twelve cents an hour, and housework at the Ladies Board- ing House, two cents an hour. The menu, incidentally, was meat once a day, bread and milk for supper, milk and thin cakes for breakfast. She wrote "I room in the highest story so have to carry water up two flights of stairs, wood only one flight ... " Considering her income it was lucky that room and tuition were only sixteen dollars a year, but it takes a lot of two centses to earn even so little. Small, rosy, with an extraordinarily sweet voice, burning to right the wrongs of slaves and of women, she planned to become a lecturer and organized a debating society to get practice. Girls were not allowed to speak in public even at Oberlin.
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