Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment

By Eleanor Clift

After seventy-two arduous years, the fate of the suffrage movement and its masterwork, the Nineteenth Amendment, rested not only on one state, Tennessee, but on the shoulders of a single man: twenty-four-year-old legislator Harry Burn. Burn had previously voted with the antisuffrage forces. If he did so again, the vote would be tied and the amendment would fall one state short of the thirty-six necessary for ratification. At the last minute, though, Harry Burn’s mother convinced him to vote in favor of the suffragist, and American history was forever changed.

In this riveting account, political analyst Eleanor Clift chronicles the many thrilling twists and turns of the suffrage struggle and shows how the issues and arguments that surrounded the movement still reverberate today. Beginning with the Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention of 1848, Clift introduces the movement’s leaders, recounts the marches and demonstrations, and profiles the opposition—antisuffragists, both men and women, who would do anything to stop women from getting the vote.

Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment mines the many rich stories buried deep within this tumultuous period of our history. Here, Clift reveals how:

• Opposition came not only from men, but also from women who were afraid of losing the special protection they enjoyed as the"weaker sex." It wasn’t until the United States was preparing to enter World War I to defend democracy around the world that denying women the vote became indefensible.
• Frail and beautiful Inez Milholland Boissevain died campaigning for suffrage and became a martyr to the movement. Her death spurred protests in front of the White House, to the embarrassment of President Wilson.
• The president directed the mass arrests of these peacefully picketing suffragists, and they endured miserable prison conditions that horrified the nation.
• Race divided the suffrage leaders. Frederick Douglass played a crucial role during the early suffrage meetings—and later was betrayed by Susan B. Anthony.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton had a penchant for "bloomers" as a symbol of women’s independence—a risky fashion statement that backfired.

A stirring reminder for women to never take their rights for granted, Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment profiles the brave figures who spent their lives supporting the women’s movement over the course of seventy-two years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Aug 24, 2007
• ISBN: 9780470256152

Eleanor Clift

Eleanor Clift is a political reporter, television pundit and author. She is currently a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine, a regular panelist on The McLaughlin Group, and is also a political contributor for the Fox News Channel. She is the author of Selecting a President.

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Introduction

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Helen Thomas encouraged me to write this book. A media icon whose long career spans nine presidents, Thomas started in journalism writing radio copy during World War II. When the war was over and the men returned home, women were expected to give up their jobs and go back to tending house. Thomas loved the workplace and eventually became the equal of any man as one of the longest-serving and best-known White House correspondents. We were on a panel not long ago speaking to high school students, and Thomas urged the girls never to take their rights for granted. She told them the suffragists marched for thirty years before women got the vote, and that Susan B. Anthony and others were jailed for daring to demand access to the ballot box. And these are rights we should have been born with, she concluded with gusto. The girls listened wide-eyed as though happening upon this piece of history for the first time. They couldn’t imagine a time when women weren’t allowed to vote. Young women today think this all just dropped from the sky, Thomas said with a sigh. They have no idea how long women struggled.

The Founding Sisters must have been smiling when ten-year-old Mindy Tucker announced with great conviction to her classmates that a woman could be president. Her fifth-grade teacher in Texas, Mr. Clodfelter, a fearsome presence in the classroom, found the assertion so preposterous that at the next parent-teacher conference, he asked the girl’s mother where she might have gotten such an outlandish notion. It was 1980, and girls were not encouraged to think of themselves as future presidents. Tucker’s mother told him it was her idea. Divorced and with a career of her own, she set the example for her daughter. The next decades brought visible progress for women in all the professions, including politics. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the prospect of a woman president no longer seemed radical or ridiculous, and girls were increasingly brought up to think of themselves as leaders in the society in addition to homemakers. Tucker became the first female spokesperson at the Justice Department, a job she landed after working in George W. Bush’s presidential campaign. She laughs when she recounts her grade-school experience. It seems so remote and unconnected to American life today, when women take their place along with men as senators, Supreme Court justices, presidential advisers, and presidential candidates.

First lady Edith Wilson was among those who found the suffragists disgusting creatures. She did not hide her disdain for the societal disruption they represented. Yet her reverence for tradition did not stop her from taking over her husband’s duties after he suffered a disabling stroke, making her the most powerful woman ever to live in the White House, while at the same time concealing the true nature of her husband’s impairment. She probably saw it less as seizing power than protecting her husband’s image, which would fall within the wifely sphere. Women were fearful that suffrage would topple them from their pedestal and thrust them into competition with men for which they were not suited. They worried that by claiming equality they would lose the special protections they enjoyed as the weaker sex. This argument was revisited in more recent times when writer Nora Ephron quipped that the most enduring legacy of the feminist movement was the Dutch treat.

Women are not equal in every respect to men; there are still battles to be fought. But a girl born today begins her journey with an equal sense of possibility for the future. Women are the crown jewel of the electorate. Politicians court their votes; the fabled soccer moms decide elections; and women, if they ever decided to vote as a bloc, could run the country. It was not always this way. When Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated president in March 1913, a married woman was considered the property of her husband. Women couldn’t serve on juries or in the event of divorce gain custody of their children. Women couldn’t travel alone comfortably. A lone woman staying in a hotel was considered loose. It was radical thinking to propose that women participate in society directly as individuals rather than as an extension of their husbands or fathers. Opponents of suffrage predicted family life would collapse if women were allowed out of their preordained sphere of house and home. Suffrage comes from the Latin suffragiem, or vote, and it was at the heart of the reform movements that began to take root in America beginning in the 1890s, during what was known as the Progressive Era.

Cultural change of this magnitude doesn’t occur unless millions of people come to a consensus that it is needed. How public opinion was molded and then mobilized to pass the Nineteenth Amendment to ensure women the right to vote is the model for the other major social movements of the twentieth century. The future passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the antiwar protests during the Vietnam era, and the modern women’s movement of the 1970s all have their roots in the seventy-two-year battle to win woman suffrage, as it was called at the time. What makes the suffrage movement most unlike the others is that most of its intended beneficiaries for most of those seven-plus decades did not share its goals. The majority of women did not particularly care about getting the vote, or were openly hostile toward suffrage. Women who wanted the vote were for the longest time in the minority among women.

My own career parallels the women’s movement. I started at Newsweek as a secretary in 1963, with no expectation of becoming a reporter or a writer. With rare exceptions, women at the newsmagazines were confined to clerical and research positions. I was grateful to work in a place where what I typed was interesting. When feminist Gloria Steinem appeared on the cover of Newsweek in March 1970, there was no woman on staff whom the editors would entrust to write about her. An outsider was brought in, journalist Helen Dudar, who did a first-rate job interpreting the new feminism sweeping the country as a long-lasting movement with consequences for women and men alike. But the fuse was lit. The women at Newsweek brought a class-action suit against the magazine for discrimination. Nora Ephron, a Newsweek researcher, was among the plaintiffs. The Washington Post owns Newsweek, and when publisher Katharine Graham learned of the lawsuit, she asked, Which side am I supposed to be on? She was management, but she also was a woman.

The case was settled out of court, and Newsweek agreed to a system of goals and timetables to advance women at the magazine. I applied for an internship, and the biggest hurdle I had to get over was convincing the chief of correspondents that I could handle out-of-town assignments because I had young children. Soon after my internship, I was assigned to cover Jimmy Carter’s first presidential campaign. When he won, I was named White House correspondent for Newsweek. I call it my Cinderella story.

This is the story of the Founding Sisters. They engineered the greatest expansion of democracy on a single day that the world had ever seen, and yet suffrage faded from public memory almost as soon as it happened. The leaders built no monuments to themselves, and they didn’t form an organization to give out medals every year. Those who lived to see their vision become a reality returned to their lives much as the women of World War II went back home. Twenty-six million women voted in the presidential election of 1920, most of them echoing the views of the men in their lives. It wasn’t until 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan that the political parties recognized the potential of women as an independent voting force. Wary of Reagan’s cowboy image, women did not embrace the former actor with the same exuberance as men, giving rise to the gender gap that has been a feature of American politics ever since.

1

Stirrings of Discontent

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Early grumblings among women over their second-class status surfaced during colonial times when Abigail Adams implored her husband and future president John Adams to remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Adams was meeting with the Continental Congress in Philadelphia when Abigail wrote him in March 1776 from their farm near Boston to urge that any new code of laws drafted along with the Declaration of Independence put women on a more equal footing. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands, she pleaded. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation. That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.

Though Adams recognized that his wife’s superior business sense allowed him the luxury of a life in politics, he didn’t take seriously the yearnings she expressed. He was bemused by her letter, and presumed that somebody must have planted these strange thoughts in her head. He didn’t even try to humor her. Depend on it, he wrote back. We know better than to repeal our masculine systems. There was no women’s movement during the Revolutionary period to apply pressure on the Founding Fathers. Maybe we can credit pillow talk for the gender-neutral language in the Declaration of Independence. The promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and a government that derives power from the consent of the governed did not exclude women. To the contrary, it established democratic principles upon which the suffrage movement was based.

The early suffragists were abolitionists, and the drive to end slavery became linked in the public mind with agitation for women’s civil rights. Women abolitionists crossed the ocean to attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention in June 1840. Among the delegates was twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was attending with her journalist husband, Henry. They had just gotten married the previous month and were on their honeymoon. Filled with the idealism of youth and brimming with ideas, Elizabeth Stanton expected to fully participate in this intellectual assemblage of world leaders. She wrote later how chagrined she was to discover that American clergymen, who had landed a few days earlier, had been busily engaged in fanning the English prejudice into active hostility against the admission of these women into the Convention. The women argued that a country governed by Queen Victoria surely wouldn’t exclude them; their opponents pointed out with equal certitude that the queen had sent a man, Prince Albert, to convey her antislavery views instead of appearing herself. A vote on whether to seat the female delegates lost by a decisive margin, and the women were relegated to an area behind a curtain, where they could hear what was going on but would not be visible.

Stanton was outraged by the treatment. She had been rebelling against the boundaries imposed on her gender since she was a child. One of eleven children, she had seen several of her siblings die before reaching adulthood, not an uncommon experience in the days before vaccines and antibiotics. Four of her five brothers died when they were children, and the fifth passed away when he was twenty years old. Her father was overcome with grief, and the young Elizabeth would climb into his lap in an effort to comfort him. What he said would shape her life, and her life’s work. Oh my darling, I wish you were a boy. She tried hard to fill the void in his life, promising, I will try to be all the boy my brother was. There was no endeavor that was off-limits in her mind because of her gender. She learned to ride a horse and jump high fences as adeptly as any boy. She won a Latin competition and became so skilled at oratory that her father worried she was getting too good at tasks meant for men, a stigma that could make her less appealing as a wife.

Stanton worked for fifty years to see that women could vote, and she died before it happened. What sustained her that day in 1840 as she sat behind the curtain was a vision of what was possible, if women would only demand their fair share. Stanton didn’t worry about social conventions. She had persuaded her husband to omit the traditional bride’s vow of obedience from their wedding ceremony. Sitting cordoned off like some alien species made her angry, and as women tend to do, Stanton found a soul-mate. Before long, she and Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia, who was a generation older and a battle-hardened veteran of the abolitionist wars, abandoned the convention and spent much of their time haranguing the male delegates staying at their hotel for their undemocratic behavior. The two women vowed to convene a woman’s rights convention once they returned home to America.

Eight years passed before the promise they made to each other on a long walk in one of London’s parks would become a reality. Life got in the way. Stanton had given birth to the first three of her seven children, while her husband studied law with her father, who was a judge in Johnstown, New York. After Henry Stanton passed the bar, the family moved to Boston, where Elizabeth thrived in the cosmopolitan atmosphere. Henry longed for a less competitive environment, and in 1847 the couple moved to Seneca Falls, New York, a sleepy upstate community where he could establish a law practice of his own without fear of competition. Elizabeth missed her activist Boston friends, and was miserable in Seneca Falls.

In one of those fateful moments of history, who should materialize at the same time in this out-of-the-way western New York town than Lucretia Mott. Her youngest sister lived in the area and was pregnant with her seventh child. Mott had come to visit, pleased that despite the numerous pregnancies, her sister clung to unconventional ideas, teaching her sons needlework, and bragging that one had knit a bag for his marbles. At an afternoon tea at the home of a mutual acquaintance, Stanton and Mott renewed their friendship and revived their call for a woman’s convention. Egged on by the other women there, all Quaker activists like Mott, they took action that very afternoon in 1848, composing the notice that would appear a few days later in the Seneca County Courier and launch the long campaign to win woman suffrage:

WOMAN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION—A Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women, will be held in the Wesleyan Chapel, at Seneca Falls, New York, on Wednesday and Thursday, the nineteenth and 20th of July, current; commencing at 10 o’clock A.M. During the first day the meeting will be exclusively for women, who are earnestly invited to attend. The public generally are invited to be present on the second day, when Lucretia Mott, of Philadelphia, and other ladies and gentlemen, will address the convention.

The Sunday morning before the convention, the women gathered in the parlor of one of the local Quaker women activists to draft the program. First they pored over papers from the numerous meetings they had attended having to do with ending slavery, banning alcohol, and promoting peace. None seemed right for the far-reaching changes they sought in the status of women. They decided to think really big, so they took as their model the Declaration of Independence, which had been written seventy-two years earlier, in 1776. Little did they know it would be another seventy-two years before their Declaration of Sentiments would be fulfilled, or they might not have been so giddy with enthusiasm as they struck the words the present King of Great Britain as the purveyor of tyranny and substituted all men.

Some three hundred people showed up at the Wesleyan Chapel on the morning of July 19, quite a large number considering it was a weekday, when people had chores to tend to, and Seneca Falls’s population was only eight thousand. The organizers had a last-minute moment of panic when they discovered the doors were locked and they were

Reviews for Founding Sisters and the Nineteenth Amendment

[feminist_prof · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An easily accessible discussion of the suffrage movement. Gives a clear idea of the roles that the latter years' main suffrage organizations played in the fight for women's right to vote.