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Sisters of Suffrage: British and American Women Fight for the Vote
by Barbara Winslow
Associate Professor, School of Education and Women's Studies Program, and Program Coordinator, Adolescence Social Studies, Brooklyn College
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| Official Program-Woman Suffrage Procession. Cover illustration by Dale for the National American Woman Suffrage Association parade, Washington, D.C., March 3, 1913. LOT5541 (Courtesy Library of Congress) |
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The dominant narrative of the entire women’s suffrage
movement begins and ends with the United States and Britain.
Hundreds of thousands of women petitioned, canvassed,
lobbied, demonstrated, engaged in mass civil disobedience,
went to jail, and engaged in hunger strikes in a seventy-five-year
ongoing political and social struggle for the right to
vote. In the United States, the organized movement for
women’s suffrage began in 1848, when 300 people
showed up in the small bustling town of Seneca Falls,
New York to attend the first women’s rights convention,
which was organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia
Mott, and three other women’s rights reformers.
Stanton drafted a Declaration of Sentiments for the convention,
which called for, among many things, “right [of
women] to the elective franchise.” Organizing for
women’s suffrage was temporarily suspended as a
result of the Civil War (1861-65). After Reconstruction
ended in 1876, most women’s rights energies were
channeled into the struggle for suffrage. From 1876 until
the beginning of the twentieth century, most suffrage
organizing consisted of countless local and state campaigns,
involvement in referendums, and convincing politicians
to support women’s suffrage. And during those years,
women won the right to vote in Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho,
and Utah. The growth of urbanization and industrialization
in the late nineteenth century, combined with a more restive
organized labor and social reform movement, intensified
the struggle for women’s suffrage. In the early
years of the twentieth century, more and more states granted
women’s suffrage, and the National Women’s
Suffrage Association (NWSA) having just united rival suffrage
organizations, pressed its claim for state and federal
women’s suffrage amendments. In 1920, the Nineteenth
Amendment granted women the right to vote.
In England, the organized suffrage movement began in 1866,
when a number of prominent women’s rights reformers
gathered some 1,500 signatures on a petition to Parliament
requesting the right to vote. Signers included John Stuart
Mill, who had successfully run for Parliament on a platform
that included votes for women. From 1870 – 1905,
a period often referred to as “the doldrums,”
suffragists did not make significant headway in mobilizing
either widespread support or popular enthusiasm for extending
the suffrage. But with the explosion of “militancy,”
beginning in 1905, hundreds of thousands of women pushed
women’s suffrage to center stage, challenged conventional
notions of women’s role, and confronted the government
in never-before dreamed-of acts of mass militancy and
civil disobedience. English women won limited suffrage
in 1918, and then in 1928, the majority of English women
won the right to vote.
There are many commonalities and links between these histories
of suffrage. English and American suffragists had a long
history of relationships and organizational connections
with each other. The idea of a woman’s rights convention
was first formulated by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia
Mott while they attended the World Anti-Slavery Conference
in London in 1840. Stanton and other U.S. women’s
rights reformers remained in contact with their English
sisters. In the twentieth century the links continued.
Emmeline, Christabel, and Sylvia Pankhurst, leaders of
the militant wing of the English suffragette movement,
made a number of visits to the U.S. American women, including
Harriot Stanton Blatch, Alice Paul, and Lucy Burns, worked
with the Pankhursts and the Women’s Social and Political
Union (WSPU), and introduced the WSPU’s ideas of
militantcy and pageantry to the U.S. women’s suffrage
movement.
Along with the longstanding political and social relationships
between the British and U.S. movements, there were similarities
both in the circumstances that these movements faced and
in their styles and approaches. One similarity was that
in both countries suffrage was based on gender. In the
period before the American Revolution, propertied women
in a few colonies could vote, but when the U.S. Constitution
was ratified, states specifically gave men the vote. (New
Jersey briefly granted property-owning women the vote
but rescinded it soon afterwards.) In England the reform
bills of 1832 and 1867 respectively excluded women.
In both countries, to be sure, suffrage was based on class,
race, nation, and religion as well as on gender. Another
similarity is that suffragists in both countries were
outside the political establishment. They had to campaign
alone, without support from national leaders -- presidents
and prime ministers -- or from the major political parties
-- the Democrats and Republicans in the U.S., and in Britain,
the Liberal, Conservative, and Labour parties. Suffragists
in both countries (and overwhelmingly in the U.S.) were
white and middle-class, and their arguments for women’s
suffrage reflected their class position. In the first
phase of the two campaigns, the arguments for suffrage
focused on equality; in the latter part of the nineteenth
century and first two decades of the twentieth century,
women’s unique contribution to nation- and empire-building
was put forward as an argument for suffrage. Both suffrage
movements sought the vote for privileged women, ignoring
at best, opposing at worst, suffrage for working-class
and colonized women -- and in the U. S., for African American
women. Another common thread was the impact of World War
I on women and the struggle for suffrage. Many historians
have noted that women’s war work convinced a number
of men (who were voters) that women’s enthusiastic
participation in the war effort had earned them the right
to vote.
Thus, the U.S. and British woman’s suffrage movements
clearly shared many features. But there were also several
important differences. First, in England, unlike the United
States, suffrage was by 1866 based on property as well
as gender. The Liberal and Conservative parties were not
interested in expanding suffrage at all; the radical and
labor movements, which did argue for expanding adult suffrage,
ignored women. To these groups, “adult suffrage”
was the code word for “adult male suffrage.”
However, the political argument for women’s suffrage,
Votes for Women, meant voting rights on the same basis
as men. Thus, given the exclusion of non-propertied working-class
men from the electorate, Votes for Women in England meant
votes for propertied women.
In the U.S., where race was more divisive than class,
the franchise had been extended to almost all white male
citizens by 1836. The struggle to extend the franchise
to African Americans was a central demand of African American
abolitionists. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
guaranteed the franchise to African American men, but
specifically excluded women. After 1870, issues of race
and racism shaped the U.S. women’s suffrage movement.
While African American women supported and organized for
suffrage, they were denied admission into the major suffrage
organizations and meetings; meanwhile, suffragists used
arguments of white racial supremacy as a rationale for
giving women the vote.
Second, England had a parliamentary government, and therefore,
the strategy and tactics of the suffragists were based
on convincing the party in power to introduce and pass
legislation. The militant wing of the suffrage movement,
led by the WSPU, vowed to campaign against all parliamentary
candidates of the political party in power if women’s
suffrage legislation was not enacted. In the U.S., a representative
republic, there were no national elections that would
simultaneously determine the ruling party of both the
executive and the legislature – and thus suffragists
did not have the same kind of centralized power base to
which they could appeal. In addition, each state was responsible
for determining its own suffrage status. So suffragists
had to adopt two strategies: One was to ignore the federal
government and campaign on a state-by-state basis. This
appealed in part to conservative and Southern women, who
could maintain racially exclusionary suffrage laws in
their particular states. The other approach was to campaign
for an amendment to the Constitution – a federal
approach. This entailed convincing Congress as well as
campaigning on a state-by-state basis. In the end, it
took a federal amendment to enact women’s suffrage
in the U.S.
A final difference was the degree of militancy in the
two movements. The history of the twentieth-century English
suffrage movement is dominated by the militant leadership
of the WSPU. Hundreds of thousands of women took to the
streets, demonstrated, heckled politicians, chained themselves
to Parliament, blew up buildings, smashed windows, went
to jail, and endured the torture of forced feeding; in
short they disrupted Edwardian England in a way not seen
in the country since the days of the Chartist agitation.
The mass militancy of women no doubt was a major factor
in forcing the Liberal government to grant women’s
suffrage in 1918.
There was no equivalent to this level of militancy in
the United States. This is not to say that there weren’t
mass demonstrations, picketing, and pageantry. Alice Paul’s
Congressional Union continued the struggle for suffrage
during World War I, with members demonstrating and chaining
themselves to the White House, and suffering arrest, prison,
and forced feedings. However, this militancy and disruption
were not on the same scale as English militancy.
For all the commonalities and differences, in both countries,
the hope for social peace was an overriding factor in
winning women’s suffrage. Both countries had experienced
growing social unrest before World War I, and it was thought
that enfranchising women just might placate a significant
section of the population, and bring it into the workings
of the state. Finally, in both the U.S. and Britain, the
struggle for women’s suffrage was, in the words
of leading suffrage historian Ellen Dubois, “a concrete
reform and a symbol of women’s freedom, widely appreciated
as such by supporters and opponents alike.”
Footnotes:
1. Woman’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights.
New York: New York University Press, 1998, p. 4.
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