This year is the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. In honor of that anniversary, this article provides a brief history of the suffrage movement in the U.S. Next month, we’ll bring it a little closer to home and provide a brief history of the suffrage movement in South Dakota.
The Seneca Falls Conference, in Seneca Falls, New York, is considered the birthplace of the suffrage movement in the United States. On July 4, 1848, a group of 300 people, including 40 men, held a conference to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of women. Several years before, in 1840, the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused to seat women at the convention. Two of those women – Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – met each other again in Seneca Falls, became friends and decided to organize their own convention.
At the convention, Stanton presented the opening address, where she read a Declaration of Sentiments. It started on a familiar note, with these words: “When in the course of human events...” However, the tone and content soon changed. Stanton went on to say: “This history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries on the part of man towards women; having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be admitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice. He has withheld from her the rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners. He’s deprived her of this first right of a citizen -- the elective franchise. As a consequence, he’s left her without representation in the halls of legislation and has oppressed her on all sides….”
Stanton concluded by saying that married women were civilly dead. Single women were taxed without representation. They were all deprived of the ballot, of rights of property, of the right to their persons and of rights over their children. Women were deprived of educational and occupational opportunities and were subjected to a double standard of morality and to the assumption of the basic superiority of men. And, they were catalogued in state constitutions with idiots, lunatics, criminals and paupers and this, Ms. Stanton said, would have to change!
As might be expected, the national suffrage movement was opposed by big business, particularly the oil industry, the railroads, the liquor industry and organized religion. Any organization that was comfortable with the status quo and a male-dominated world was opposed to suffrage for women.
Although the suffrage movement started in the East, it spread with the pioneers to the western part of the U.S. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory was the first place in the United States to pass a women’s suffrage measure. At first, men saw it as a great way to get publicity in the eastern papers and to attract new settlers. However, officials there did stand firm in their commitment to suffrage, even when it threatened their petition for statehood. “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women,” they told Congress, which relented and admitted Wyoming to statehood in 1890.
National suffragists focused on meetings, speeches and petitions. When that didn’t yield results, the suffragists took note of the actions of those working in the British suffrage movement. While older members continued to focus on meetings, speeches and petitions, the newer and younger leaders of the national movement tried a more radical approach, focusing their efforts instead on marches, parades and picketing. In fact, many tools of protest that activists use today were honed by the suffragists, from mass marches and picketing outside the White House to wearing badges and pins to express support for a cause. In the later days of the suffrage campaign, a group called the Silent Sentinels picketed the While House six days a week, forcing President Wilson to see their demands, literally, every time he looked out the window.
In January 1918, nine months before the end of World War I, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a suffrage amendment and, as it moved through the Senate, Wilson gave it his full support. “We have made partners of the women in this war,” he said on September 30, 1918. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not a partnership of privilege and right?” The women were right to question Wilson’s motives. But, they really didn’t care, as long as he supported the movement in public. While the U.S. Senate rejected the amendment the next day, it was eventually approved in June 1919 and sent to the states for ratification.
Tennessee provided the 36th vote for ratification. It was a circus in the Tennessee state capitol that day, since the anti-temperance movement (a long-time enemy of the suffrage movement) was also there, campaigning against ratification. The deciding vote came from Harry Burn, a 24-year-old man who had pledged to vote “No” but had received a letter from his mother that morning. “Be a good boy,” she wrote “and support suffrage.”
The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920 and was added to the constitution eight days later. It was the single largest act of enfranchisement in the history of the United States, with 9 million women casting their first ballots in November 1920. It had taken 3 generations of American women to win the right to vote and many of the women who started the movement didn’t live long enough to see passage of the 19th Amendment.
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Information for this article was taken from Cecelia Wittmayer’s master’s thesis, “Newspaper Coverage of the Suffrage Movement in South Dakota at the Time of Statehood”.
Article published in October 22, 2020 issue of the Miner county Pioneer Newspaper.
The Seneca Falls Conference, in Seneca Falls, New York, is considered the birthplace of the suffrage movement in the United States. On July 4, 1848, a group of 300 people, including 40 men, held a conference to discuss the social, civil and religious rights of women. Several years before, in 1840, the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London refused to seat women at the convention. Two of those women – Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton – met each other again in Seneca Falls, became friends and decided to organize their own convention.
At the convention, Stanton presented the opening address, where she read a Declaration of Sentiments. It started on a familiar note, with these words: “When in the course of human events...” However, the tone and content soon changed. Stanton went on to say: “This history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries on the part of man towards women; having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be admitted to a candid world. He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she has no voice. He has withheld from her the rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men, both natives and foreigners. He’s deprived her of this first right of a citizen -- the elective franchise. As a consequence, he’s left her without representation in the halls of legislation and has oppressed her on all sides….”
Stanton concluded by saying that married women were civilly dead. Single women were taxed without representation. They were all deprived of the ballot, of rights of property, of the right to their persons and of rights over their children. Women were deprived of educational and occupational opportunities and were subjected to a double standard of morality and to the assumption of the basic superiority of men. And, they were catalogued in state constitutions with idiots, lunatics, criminals and paupers and this, Ms. Stanton said, would have to change!
As might be expected, the national suffrage movement was opposed by big business, particularly the oil industry, the railroads, the liquor industry and organized religion. Any organization that was comfortable with the status quo and a male-dominated world was opposed to suffrage for women.
Although the suffrage movement started in the East, it spread with the pioneers to the western part of the U.S. In 1869, the Wyoming Territory was the first place in the United States to pass a women’s suffrage measure. At first, men saw it as a great way to get publicity in the eastern papers and to attract new settlers. However, officials there did stand firm in their commitment to suffrage, even when it threatened their petition for statehood. “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women,” they told Congress, which relented and admitted Wyoming to statehood in 1890.
National suffragists focused on meetings, speeches and petitions. When that didn’t yield results, the suffragists took note of the actions of those working in the British suffrage movement. While older members continued to focus on meetings, speeches and petitions, the newer and younger leaders of the national movement tried a more radical approach, focusing their efforts instead on marches, parades and picketing. In fact, many tools of protest that activists use today were honed by the suffragists, from mass marches and picketing outside the White House to wearing badges and pins to express support for a cause. In the later days of the suffrage campaign, a group called the Silent Sentinels picketed the While House six days a week, forcing President Wilson to see their demands, literally, every time he looked out the window.
In January 1918, nine months before the end of World War I, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a suffrage amendment and, as it moved through the Senate, Wilson gave it his full support. “We have made partners of the women in this war,” he said on September 30, 1918. “Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not a partnership of privilege and right?” The women were right to question Wilson’s motives. But, they really didn’t care, as long as he supported the movement in public. While the U.S. Senate rejected the amendment the next day, it was eventually approved in June 1919 and sent to the states for ratification.
Tennessee provided the 36th vote for ratification. It was a circus in the Tennessee state capitol that day, since the anti-temperance movement (a long-time enemy of the suffrage movement) was also there, campaigning against ratification. The deciding vote came from Harry Burn, a 24-year-old man who had pledged to vote “No” but had received a letter from his mother that morning. “Be a good boy,” she wrote “and support suffrage.”
The 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920 and was added to the constitution eight days later. It was the single largest act of enfranchisement in the history of the United States, with 9 million women casting their first ballots in November 1920. It had taken 3 generations of American women to win the right to vote and many of the women who started the movement didn’t live long enough to see passage of the 19th Amendment.
_____________________
Information for this article was taken from Cecelia Wittmayer’s master’s thesis, “Newspaper Coverage of the Suffrage Movement in South Dakota at the Time of Statehood”.
Article published in October 22, 2020 issue of the Miner county Pioneer Newspaper.